Bari Weiss: You are the last line of defense

Transcribed by Rami Pinku using OpenAI 

Thank you so much. When Jean gave me the list of people who had previously given the Barbara Olson lecture, I was absolutely sure that you guys had made a mistake in inviting me. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a legal scholar. I'm not a former attorney general. In my time at the Wall Street Journal, I edited dozens of op-eds about Chevron deference, but I'm still not sure what the hell that means. 

I'm also not a member of the Federalist Society. My parents, who are here in the front row, who probably couldn't afford the local country club, raised us on the Groucho Marx line that I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. And then there's the question of my politics. I hear you guys are conservative, so forgive me then.  I'd like to begin by acknowledging that we're standing on the ancestral indigenous land of Leonard Leo. I read in ProPublica that this is his turf.

But then I googled Barbara Olson. I had the privilege of editing some op-eds by Ted back in the day, and I knew that his wife had been murdered by Al-Qaeda in 9-11. But over the past few weeks in my non-spare time, I spent a bunch of it reading about Barbara herself. I read about a Texas girl, the daughter of German immigrants, who was ferociously independent. I read about how she, a Catholic, wound up at Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University. And I read about how she, as an intern at the Department of Justice, was apparently the only person with sufficient chutzpah to personally serve the papers at the PLO mission to the UN. And I learned that she was on American Airlines Flight 77 because she was headed to LA to be on Bill Maher's show, and because she had changed her flight so she could have a birthday dinner with Ted. And I learned that she had the composure and the clarity and the courage to call him not just once but twice in those horrifying moments before the plane slammed into the Pentagon.

There is a phrase that Jews say when a person dies, and that phrase is, may their memory be for a blessing. And it's an expression of hope. But it is so clear in the case of Barbara Olsen, and the way that the force of her life and her character extends and echoes on, that it is very much a blessing fulfilled. To say that I am honored to give a lecture in the name of such an exceptional woman would be an understatement. So thank you.

It is also, since the massacre of October 7th, a date that will be seared into the memory of civilized people alongside September 11th, profoundly fitting.   I don't think it's a coincidence that Israel is the only country outside of America which is home to a 9-11 memorial bearing every single one of the victims names.

And of course, that is what we must talk about tonight, the civilizational war we are in, the war that took the life of Barbara Olson and 3,000 other innocent Americans on that morning of September 2001, and the war that came hideously across the border from Gaza into Israel on that Shabbat morning a month ago, the war that too many foolishly thought had ended.

The physical war currently raging in the Middle East with questions about the right way to defeat Hamas and other members of the jihadi death cult, the kind of operation Israel should be pursuing in Gaza, how America should abandon its fatal appeasement of Iran, and a hundred other strategic questions. Those are subjects for another speech and one for which there are many more qualified people to deliver. 

Tonight, I'd like to talk about the war of ideas, of conviction, and of will that faces us as Americans. I want to talk about the stakes of that war and how we must wage it fearlessly and relentlessly if we seek to build a world fit for our children and if we want to save America itself. 

By the time Americans woke up on October 7, 2023, it was clear that what had unfolded while we slept was not like previous wars or battles that Israel had fought in its 75-year history. This was a genocidal pogrom. It was a scene out of the places that Jews had fled, a scene out of the history of the Nazi Holocaust or the European pogroms before that, or of the Farhud, the 1941 massacre of Jews in Baghdad, a city that, it's hard to believe now, was 40% Jewish at the beginning of the 20th century. All of these scenes reminding us of Israel's necessity.

The Hamas terrorists came across the border into southern Israel on foot and on motorbike. They came by truck and by car and paraglider and they came with a plan. They came to Israel to maim and to murder and to mutilate anyone that they could find and that is what they did. 

These were Cossacks with smartphones. They called their families to brag that they had murdered Jews, dad, dad, I killed 10 Jews, said one. Others filmed the slaughter from their GoPros. Some used cell phones of the victims themselves to upload the footage of their torture and their murder so their families would have to encounter it first on their Facebook pages.

In all of this, the terrorists are laughing, they are euphoric, there is no one who has watched that horrifying, unedited footage who fails to note the hideous glee of the butchers. Some Israelis were literally disappeared on October 7th and I'm not talking about the hostages. I'm talking about people that were burned at such high heat that volunteers are still sifting through the bones and the remnant teeth to identify them. But  more than 200 people are currently being held hostage by Hamas and more than 1,400 were murdered in those terrible hours. Among the dead are some 30 American citizens and there are at least 10 Americans among the hostages. All of which is why the immediate analogy the world reached for was to 9-11. As with 9-11, the terrorists caught their victims by surprise on a clear blue morning. As with 9-11, the spectacle and the savagery were the point. As with 9-11, the terrorists notched points on their sadistic scoreboard, taking from us not just precious lives but our sense of safety and security. They changed something within us.

But the difference between 9-11 and 10-7, two massacres of innocent people, symbols to their killers of Western civilization, was the reaction to the horror. The difference between 9-11 and 10-7 was that the catastrophe of 10-7 was followed on October 8th by a different kind of catastrophe, a moral and spiritual catastrophe that was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of those men and women and children had even been identified. 

People poured into the streets of our capital cities to celebrate the slaughter. In Sydney, crowds gathered at the Opera House cheering, gas the Jews. People rejoiced on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York and Paris. Then came BLM Chicago using the paraglider, a symbol of mass death, as a symbol of freedom. Then came posters across our campuses calling for Israel to burn. Then came our own offices at the Free Press in New York City vandalized with F Jews and F Israel.

Then came Harvard's task force to create safe spaces for pro-Hamas students. And then, as thunder follows lightning, more dead Jews. An anti-Israel protester outside of Los Angeles killed a 69-year-old Jewish man this week for the apparent sin of waving an Israeli flag, though NBC's initial headline made it hard to follow. Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say.  

In lockstep, the social justice crowd, the crowd who has tried so hard to convince us that words are violence, insisted that actual violence was a necessity, that rape was resistance, that torture was liberation. University presidents who leapt to issue morally lucid condemnations of George Floyd's killing or Putin's war against Ukraine offered silence or mealy-mouthed pablum about how the situation is complex and how we need to think of both sides as if there's some kind of equivalence between innocent civilians and jihadists. But the most alarming of all were the young people who threw their support not behind the innocent victims of Hamas terror, but behind Hamas and genocide. 

 At George Washington University just down the road, students projected the words, glory to our martyrs, and free Palestine from the river to the sea in giant letters on a campus building. At Cooper Union in Manhattan, Jewish students had to hide in the library because a mob was pounding on the door. At Columbia, my old professor, Joseph Massad, called the slaughter awesome. At Cornell, Professor Russell Rickford said it was energizing and exhilarating. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a petition that found a way to blame Jewish victims for their own deaths, saying that they, quote, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for the unfolding violence. At Princeton, hundreds of students chanted, globalize the intifada, which can only mean one thing, open season on Jews worldwide. At NYU, students held posters that read, keep the world clean with drawings of Jewish stars in garbage cans. 

Hip young people with pronouns in their bios are not just chanting the slogans of a genocidal death cult. They are going around and tearing down the photographs of women and children who are currently being held hostage in tunnels that run under the Gaza Strip, and they do so gleefully. They laugh. They mock the nine-month-old baby who was stolen from his parents. And in doing so, they are tearing down, or at least they are trying to tear down, the essence of our common humanity, or perhaps even the reality that the hostages were taken at all, or maybe it's that they're trying to extinguish their memory, or the people actually had it coming to them. Or maybe, and I say this as the mother of a young child in whose face I see the face of every single child being held captive, they are trying to tear down the divine image that is at the very root of our civilization's conception of the dignity and the equality of every human life.

What could possibly explain this? The easy answer is that the human beings who were slaughtered on October 7th were Jews, and that anti-Semitism is the world's oldest hatred, and that in every generation, someone rises up to destroy us. They tried to wipe us out. They failed. Let's eat. That's the oldest Jewish joke in the world.

But that's not the whole answer, and that's because the proliferation of anti-Semitism, as always, is a symptom. When anti-Semitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the society or the culture or the country where it is being allowed to proliferate. Antisemitism is a warning system. It is a sign that the society itself is breaking down, that it is dying. It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis, one that explains how in the span of a little over 20 years since September 11th, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization but with a defense of barbarism.

It was 20 years ago when I was a college student that I began to encounter an ideology that drives the people who tear down the posters. It was 20 years ago that I started writing about this ideology that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child. 

At first, the things I encountered like post-modernism and post-colonialism and post-nationalism seemed like wordplay or intellectual games, little puzzles to see how you could deconstruct just about anything. But what I came to see over time was that it wasn't going to remain an academic sideshow and that it sought nothing less than the deconstruction of our society from within. This ideology seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong. It replaces the basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric, the powerless, good, and the powerful, bad. It replaces lots of things like that, color blindness with race obsession, ideas with identity, debate with denunciation and deplatforming, persuasion with public shaming, the rule of law with the fury of the mob. 

People were to be given authority in this new order, I learned, not in recognition of their gifts, their hard work, their talents, their accomplishments, or their contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantage their group had suffered as defined by radical ideologues.And so as an undergraduate, I watched in horror sounding alarms as loudly as I could back then. I was told by most adults, including Jewish communal leaders, that yeah, it wasn't great, but don't be so hysterical. Campus were always hotbeds of political radicalism, they said, and this ideology they promised me would surely dissipate as young people made their way into the world.

They were wrong. It did not do that. Over the past two decades, I saw this inverted, morally perverse worldview swallow all of the sense-making institutions of American life. It started in the universities. Then it moved beyond the quad to cultural institutions, including some that my wife and I know well, like the New York Times, as well as to every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. It has taken root in the HR departments of every major corporation. It is inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. And of course, as everyone in this room knows, it has come to the law itself. 

When you see a federal judge shouted down at Stanford, you are seeing this ideology at work. When you see people screaming outside of the homes of certain Supreme Court justices, causing them to need round-the-clock security, you are seeing its logic. The takeover of core American institutions by this ideology is so comprehensive that it's hard sometimes for people to even notice it, because it's everywhere. 

Now, for Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than by equality of opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation, and Jews are 2% of the American population, suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not actually that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world. And it's not only Jews who suffer from the suggestion that merit and excellence are dirty words. It is every single American. It is strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class. That is why Asian immigrant success, for example, is seen as so suspicious. The percentages are off. The scores are too high. The starting point, as  poor immigrants, is too low. From whom did they steal all of that success? 

The week since October 7th has been a mark-to-market moment. In other words, everyone can now see how very deep these ideas run, and we see clearly that they are not just metaphors. Decolonization isn't just a clever turn of phrase or a new way to read novels. It is a sincerely held political view that serves as a predicate to violence. If you want to understand how it could be that the editor of the Harvard Law Review was caught on camera a few weeks ago physically intimidating a Jewish student, or how a public defender in Manhattan recently spent her evening tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children, it is because they believe this and they believe it is just. And their moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine. Israelis and Jews, powerful, successful, colonizers, so they're bad. Hamas is weak. They're considered people of color, so they're good. And no, it doesn't matter that the majority of Israelis are also people of color. That baby, he's a colonizer first and a baby second. That woman, gang-raped by terrorists, shame it had to come to that, but she's a white oppressor.

This is the ideology of vandalism in the true sense of the word, the vandal-sacked Rome. It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing about how to build. It only knows how to tear down and destroy. And it has already torn down so very much. The civilization that feels as natural to us as oxygen, that takes thousands of years, thousands of nudges of progress, thousands of forgotten sacrifices and risks to build up to. But vandals can make very quick work of that. Reagan used to say that freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. And the same can be said of our civilization. 

If anything good can come out of the nightmare that began on October 7th, it is this. We have been shaken awake. We know the gravity of the stakes, and the stakes are not theoretical. They are real. 

So what can we do? 

First, we need to look. We must recover our ability to look and discern accordingly. We must look past the sloganeering and the propaganda and take a hard look at what is in front of our eyes. Look first, of course, at what just happened, at the barbarism that Hamas carried out. Then look at the reaction to it. Take stock of how profoundly the lies and the rot have traveled, how badly the forces of civilization and of good are faring in this battle, how it is that the most educated, the most pedigreed have become the most morally confused. 

The suspect in the killing of Paul Kessler is a college professor. To see the world as it is, we have to prize the distinctions that so many have forgotten, the distinctions between good and bad, better and worse, pain and not pain, safety and danger, just and unjust, friends and enemies. I do not need context to know that tying children to their parents and burning them alive is evil, just as I don't need a history lesson in the Arab-Israeli conflict to know that the Arab-Israelis who saved scores of Jewish Israelis that day are righteous.  

Look carefully, look at your enemies and your allies, and I say that to myself more than to you. Many of you have no doubt understood this for far longer than I have, but for many people, especially many people in my cohort, friends and enemies are not who they thought they were before October 7th. Accepting this might be hard for some of you, as it has been for me. It might mean giving up on nice things, giving up on Harvard, giving up on the club, or your New York Times subscription. Sorry, wrong crowd.  LAUGHTER 

But you get my point. The point is that things, prestige, they are not the point of our lives. Harvard and Yale don't give us value. We give us value. Something beyond ourselves gives us value. The something that is visible in the faces of so many people before me right now. And in recognizing allies, I'll be an example right now. I'm a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice. I know that there are some people in this room who don't believe that my marriage should have been legal. And that's okay, because we're all Americans who want lower taxes. LAUGHTER 

But I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, who my allies really are. And they are not the people who are looking at facile external markers of my identity that I might imagine them to be. 

My allies, true allies, are people who believe that America is good. My allies are people who believe that the West is good. And that human beings are created equal. And that saying so is essential to knowing what we are fighting for. America and our values, those are things worth fighting for. And that, and not any number of nonsensical or at least tertiary culture war issues, that is the priority of the day. 

The other thing to look for right now is for the good. To look for the good in these moments of darkness and to not lose sight of it. There's a New York coffee shop owner named Aaron DeHaan. He had all of his baristas quit the other day because he put an Israeli flag in the window and began fundraising for Magen David Adom, which is the Israeli Red Cross. So they all quit. But his cafe didn't close. It was quite the opposite. Suppliers sent him free shipments of beans and cups. Community members picked up shifts for him for free. There were lines around the block on the Upper East Side just to buy a cup of coffee. His cafe made $25,000 in a single day. Just this week, American cowboys, I hope you guys have seen these guys on social media, American cowboys from the Great Plains and the Rockies traveled to Israel to tend the fields and animals of Israeli farmers who have been killed in the past month

 This is the opposite of the cheap solidarity of standing with Hamas that we see across our campuses and in our city centers. This is the essence of the West. This is the essence of the idea that free people and free societies must stick together. 

It's not just, as James Woolsey once put it, that we're all Jews now. The reverse is also true. Israel is a mirror for the West and for the United States, whose founders saw a version of themselves in the biblical nation that also inspired the modern Zionists, whose descendants are now looking toward America with gratitude, but also with alarm, sensing a shared struggle ahead. So the first thing we must do is look. 

The second thing that we, really you, must do is enforce the law. The wave of the so-called progressive prosecutors that have been elected across many of our cities has proven to be an immensely bad thing for law and order in cities across America. It turns out that choosing not to enforce the law doesn't actually reduce crime, it promotes it. And it is no coincidence that many of the same activists who have pushed to defund the police are now the people physically harassing Jews in our streets. Everyone in America deserves equal protection, not only of the law, but from the forces of chaos and violence.

In Brooklyn, there have been an unconscionable number of violent attacks against Orthodox Jews over the past decade, and they've been correctly identified as hate crimes. But they're also simply crimes that if the law were upheld would be far less likely to happen, whatever their motivation. 

Masking at protests is illegal in many states, so that it doesn't become an attempt at mass intimidation a la the KKK. Now maybe that's a good idea, maybe it's a bad one, but in nearby Virginia, it happens to be the law. And yet, as David Bernstein recently pointed out in Eugene Volokh's blog, at George Mason University's Fairfax campus, nearly all of the protesters at a recent Student for Justice in Palestine rally were masked, completely covered. Were they punished for breaking the law? I suspect if they had, we would have read about it. The rallies that we're seeing right now would likely be less susceptible to erupting in violence if the attendants weren't covering their faces. So don't allow selective enforcement of this law or any others. If neo-Nazis and white supremacists can't do it, then neither can Hamas sympathizers. 

APPLAUSE

The third thing, no more double standards on speech. Public universities are constitutionally forbidden from imposing content-based restrictions on free speech, and yet that's precisely what they have been doing. Ask any conservative, and I know a few now, who's tried to speak at a public university and had a security fee imposed on them or had their speech quietly moved to an off-campus venue. Private universities can legally restrict speech, but their restrictions can't be enforced discriminatorily, and yet they are. I'm just going to give you one quite amazing example from Yale Law School. In 2021, in an example I'm sure all of you will know, law student Trent Colbert invited classmates to his trap house in his announcement of a Constitution Day bash hosted by FedSoc and the Native American Law Students Association. It took 12 hours for administrators to process discrimination complaints, haul Colbert in for a meeting, and suggest his career was on the line if he didn't sign an apology that they wrote on his behalf.

The law school dean also authorized a message condemning his language. Why all of this hullabaloo? Because trap house was a term that some claimed had racist associations with crack houses. But when Jewish students wrote that dean two weeks after the Hamas attacks, detailing the anti-Semitic vitriol they had received, they got a formulaic reply from the deputy directing them to student support services. For certain students, kid gloves. For others, the maw of whatever hate their classmates and professors can dream up. The universities are playing favorites based on the speech they prefer and the racial group hierarchies that they have established. It is a nasty game and they need to be called out for it.

APPLAUSE

Fourth, and this is my last, accept that you are the last line of defense and fight, fight, fight. If you study history and if you look at where Jews stand for better and generally for worse, you will understand with almost 100% certainty where a culture, where a country, or where a civilization stands. Whether it's on the way up or on the way down. Whether it's expanding in its freedoms or whether it's contracting them. Where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. Where difference is celebrated, genuine difference, Jews are celebrated. And where freedom of thought and of faith and of speech are protected, Jews tend to be too. And when such virtues are regarded as threats or thrown to the side, Jews will be too. As goes Ohio, so goes the nation is the famous political phrase. The Jews, please don't quote me on this, we're Ohio.

And nothing is guaranteed, nothing. The right ideas don't win on their own. They need a voice, they need prosecutors. It's time to defend our values, the values that have made this country the freest, most tolerant society in the history of the world. and to do that without hesitation or apology. The leftist intellectual Sidney Hook, who broke with the communists and called his memoir out of step for that reason, used to implore those around him to always answer an accusation or a charge, to never let a falsehood stand unchallenged. We as a culture are leaders. We have let too much go unchallenged. Too many lies have spread in the face of inaction, inaction that's come as the result of fear or wanting to be polite. 

No more. 

You are the last line of defense. Every person is the last line of defense, and we have to think about it that way. Don't bite your tongue. Don't tremble. Don't go along with the little lies. Be the skunk at the garden party. Speak up, break the wall of lies, and let nothing go unchallenged. Our enemy's failure is not assured, and there is no cavalry coming. We are the cavalry, and our civilization depends on us

Now I'm gonna close with maybe something unusual for a Federalist Society lecture, but it's a very, very rare thing for me to not be sitting at a Shabbat dinner table on a Friday night as the sun sets. So I hope you'll let me close with a little bit of Torah

Tomorrow, in every synagogue around the world, we'll read the portion of the Torah where Abraham, Avraham's wife, Sarah, dies at the ripe old age of 127. We read in the Bible that she died in Kiryat Arba, now Hebron, or Hevron, in the land of Canaan. And we read that when she does, as the Bible says, Abraham proceeded to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her. And the very next verse goes like this. Then Abraham rose from beside his dead and spoke to the Hittites, saying, I am a resident alien among you. Sell me a burial site among you so that I may remove my dead for burial. So that's the first thing he does. He buys a plot of land to bury Sarah. And the second thing he does is that he goes to find a wife for his son, Isaac. The late, great, holy man, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who I was blessed to know, tells us this about the sequence of events. Abraham heard the future calling to him. Sarah had died. Isaac was unmarried. Abraham had neither land nor grandchildren. He did not cry out in anger or anguish to God. Instead, he heard the still, small voice saying, the next step depends on you. You must create a future that I will fill with my spirit. That is how Abraham survived the shock and the grief, writes Rabbi Sacks. This is how generations of Jews before me have survived. This is how every civilization survives. 

I am so honored, as I said before, to be here speaking in this place in honor of someone who stood up courageously for all the things that mattered most and who was murdered by the enemies that we are fighting still today. Her memory is a blessing for me. There is another phrase, though, that traditional Jews invoke when speaking of someone who has been murdered, and that is, Hashem yikom dama. May God avenge her death. Amen. We, human beings, leave vengeance in the hands of God, but fighting, fighting is for all of us, especially when there is something so precious worth fighting for. 

Ted once said of Barbara that Barbara was Barbara because America, unlike any place in the world,gave her the space, freedom, oxygen, encouragement, and inspiration to be whatever she wanted to be. There is no place like this country. There is no second America for us to run to if this one fails. So get up, get up and fight for our future. This is the fight of and for our lives.  

Douglas Murray at the Israel-Gaza border

Bravo, Douglas! One can feel that we are witnessing a crucial moment in the history of western civilization.  Either we confront  the Islamists or we perish. And Israel is leading the way!

Douglas Murray proves that the Churchillian spirit of 1940 is still alive among the Brits.

Hypocrisie à l'ONU - Gilad Erdan dénonce le vote de la résolution "S'unir pour la Paix"

 Discours de Gilad Erdan, ambassadeur d'Israël à l'ONU, le 26 octobre 2023 devant Assemblée générale des Nations Unies

Remerciements à Rami Pinku pour avoir généré la transcription en envoyant l'extrait audio avec son code Python à OpenAI.

Merci, Monsieur le Président.

Chers collègues,

 

Nous sommes réunis aujourd'hui dans cette salle à la suite d'une résolution appelée "S'unir pour la Paix". Malheureusement, cette séance d'urgence n'a rien à voir avec la paix. Chaque État membre présent aujourd'hui qui est convaincu que nous sommes sur le point de discuter d'un nouveau round de conflit au Moyen-Orient, d'un autre différend entre Israël et les Palestiniens, se trompe.

 Le massacre du 7 octobre et ce qui s'en est suivi n'ont rien à voir avec les Palestiniens, rien. Il n'a rien à voir avec le conflit arabo-israélien ou la question palestinienne. Ce n'est pas une guerre avec les Palestiniens. Israël est en guerre avec l'organisation terroriste djihadiste génocidaire du Hamas. Seulement. C'est la démocratie respectueuse des lois d'Israël contre les Nazis modernes. Nazis.

 Tels sont les faits.

 Le Hamas ne se soucie pas du peuple palestinien. Il ne se soucie pas de la paix ou du dialogue. Le Hamas n'a qu'un seul objectif : anéantir Israël et assassiner chaque juif sur la surface de la terre. Leur charte originale l'exprime très clairement. Je vais vous en lire quelques lignes :

"Israël existera et continuera d'exister jusqu'à ce que l'Islam l'anéantisse."

Une autre citation.

"Il n'y a pas de solution pour le problème palestinien sauf par le jihad."

Une autre citation.

"Le jour du Jugement ne viendra pas tant que les Musulmans n'auront pas combattu les Juifs et les auront tués.".

Chers amis, le 7 octobre, il est devenu clair pour le monde entier que la charte du Hamas n'était pas une compilation de paroles vides. C'était un plan d'action. Un plan d'action.

 Imaginez une belle journée ensoleillée, un ciel dégagé, de la musique dans l'air, des jeunes qui dansent, une rave, un concert pour la paix. Oui, pour la paix. C'est vraiment la situation tôt ce matin-là du saint sabbat. Le soleil vient juste de se lever pour marquer un nouveau jour. Ce jour est aussi une grande fête juive, Simchat Torah. Simchat Torah signifie la joie de la Torah ; nous célébrons ce jour-là le Livre des livres, notre sainte Bible. Et puis en une fraction de seconde, cet Eden idyllique est devenu un enfer sur terre. L'air paisible du matin est  percé par le hurlement des sirènes de roquettes. Des milliers, je vous le dis, des milliers de mortiers et de roquettes du Hamas sont tombés sans discernement sur de nombreuses villes et villages israéliens. Mais les roquettes ne sont qu'un prétexte pour le pogrom, le pogrom qui a suivi. Les barbares terroristes du Hamas envahissent Israël par la mer, la terre et l'air. Ils ne viennent qu'avec un seul but, un seul but :  tuer sauvagement tous ceux qu'ils rencontrent. Les meurtriers nazis du Hamas vont de maison en maison avec des listes de cibles, une attaque minutieusement planifiée, volontaire et préméditée. Ils assassinent atrocement des civils dans leur lit. Ils conduisent des camionnettes équipées de mitrailleuses. Oui, nous nous en souvenons tous, comme Daesh, et ils tirent à l'aveuglette sur les centaines de jeunes réunis pour ce concert. 300, 300 d'entre eux  ont été brûlés vifs ou massacrés. La plupart de ce qui en est resté,  n'était qu'amas de chair et de membres ensanglantés. Les parents ont dû apporter les brosses à dents de leurs enfants afin qu'on puisse en tirer leur ADN et ainsi identifier à qui appartenait tel ou tel membre.

 Ces monstres du Hamas ont violé des femmes et des enfants, ont exhibé des filles nues qu'ils avaient violées et des cadavres qu'ils avaient profanés dans les rues de Gaza où des milliers, et je vous le dis, des milliers, vous pouvez voir les images, s'amusaient et les ont  acclamés. Ces sauvages ont torturé de petits bébés. Tout comme les nazis, les terroristes du Hamas ont arraché des nourrissons de leurs berceaux. Oui, nous avons des vidéos qui en témoignent. Ils les ont frappé violemment au sol jusqu'à ce que leurs crânes deviennent de la bouillie. Les enfants ont étaient tués devant leurs parents et les parents devant leurs enfants. J'ai vu une vidéo d'un terroriste qui, en se filmant lui-même, a lancé une grenade dans un abri anti-bombes où se trouvaient un père et ses deux jeunes garçons. Le père a été tué sur le coup et les deux garçons sont sortis de l'abri en hurlant que leur père est mort et qu'ils voulaient être morts aussi. Tout cela se déroule, croyez-le ou non, pendant que le monstre qui a tué leur père, se sert calmement dans le réfrigérateur de la famille.

Oui, aucun film d'horreur ne peut être comparé à la pure brutalité perpétrée par le Hamas. Non, aucun.

 Amit Mann était une jeune femme de 22 ans originaire du kibboutz Be'eri et secouriste pour Magen David Adom, la Croix-Rouge israélienne. Elle a consacré sa vie, littéralement, et vous allez comprendre pourquoi, à sauver les autres. Lorsque les monstres du Hamas ont envahi le kibboutz, Amit s'est précipitée à la clinique pour soigner autant de blessés qu'elle le pouvait. Pendant des heures, des heures, Amit a travaillé sans relâche pour essayer de sauver des vies. Elle savait que les terroristes sadiques étaient dehors, à proximité de sa clinique, car elle entendait les coups de feu, mais elle est restée là. Elle était déterminée à sauver des vies, pas à fuir. Finalement, les terroristes ont fait irruption dans sa clinique et lui ont logé une balle, une balle, dans le cerveau. Amit était une secouriste de Magen David Adom, la Croix-Rouge israélienne, en uniforme, mais cela n'a pas arrêté ces sauvages. C'est ainsi que les équipes de secours ont trouvé Amit (et l'ambassadeur Erdan.montre une photo de Amit telle qu'elle a été trouvée).

 Des ambulances ont été incendiées, pas une, plusieurs. Des dizaines d'équipes médicales de Magen David Adom ont été délibérément ciblées en se rendant auprès des blessés, et de nombreux autres secouristes ont été assassinés. L'hôpital Barzilai, dans ma ville natale d'Ashkelon, en Israël, a subi des tirs directs de roquettes du Hamas, et ce n'était pas la première fois.

 Le Hamas tire délibérément des roquettes dessus depuis des années, depuis des années, intentionnellement, et pourtant aucune condamnation de cette barbarie n'a été mentionnée ici. Pas ici, pas par le Conseil de sécurité, pas par le Secrétaire général, et pas dans cette résolution absurde. Il semble que les hôpitaux et les équipes médicales doivent être protégés uniquement tant qu'ils ne sont pas israéliens !

L'hypocrisie est inimaginable, inimaginable.

 Les monstres brutaux semblables à l'État islamique ont enlevé plus de 220 otages venant d'Israël et de dizaines d'autres pays, y compris des bébés, des bébés, des enfants, des personnes handicapées, des personnes âgées et des survivants de l'Holocauste. Kfir Bibas, Kfir Bibas a neuf mois, neuf mois, et il est retenu en otage en ce moment à Gaza, neuf mois. Quels terroristes barbares peuvent faire une telle chose ? Et avec lui, 30 autres enfants, 30 autres enfants. Nous avons vu la brutalité du Hamas en Israël. Je n'ose même pas imaginer les horreurs que les otages endurent en ce moment même pendant que nous parlons ici.

 Vingt jours se sont écoulés et Israël continue de compter ses morts. Il a fallu des semaines pour récupérer tous les corps. Certains corps sont brûlés comme des morceaux de charbon. Il est presque impossible de les identifier.

De nombreux corps brûlés ont été retrouvés avec des cendres dans leur gorge, ce qui signifie qu'ils étaient encore en vie, encore en vie lorsqu'ils les terroristes du Hamas y ont mis le  feu, intentionnellement, par. Une masse de restes humains brûlés au-delà de toute reconnaissance a été retrouvée. Au début, le personnel médical ne pouvait même pas comprendre ce qu'ils voyaient. Pourtant, après un scanner, il est devenu clair qu'il s'agissait de deux colonnes vertébrales, pas d'une, de deux colonnes vertébrales liées ensemble par du fil barbelé, l'une appartenant à un adulte et l'autre, la petite colonne vertébrale d'un enfant. Alors, essayez simplement d'imaginer ce qu'ont ressenti les parents alors qu'eux et leur enfant brûlaient vifs, brûlaient vifs. Les hurlements douloureux de l'amour de leur vie furent la dernière chose qu'ils entendirent, la dernière chose.

 Ne trouvez-vous pas incroyable que cette résolution d'aujourd'hui et cette séance ne se concentrent pas uniquement sur les atrocités du Hamas ? En lisant cette résolution, le Hamas semble être inexistant. Les auteurs de la résolution prétendent être préoccupés par la paix. Pourtant, les meurtriers dépravés qui ont déclenché cette guerre ne sont même pas mentionnés dans la résolution, même pas mentionnés. Ils vous considèrent tous comme des marionnettes. Ils rédigent une résolution totalement dépourvue de tout contenu lié à la situation. Ils supposent que vous avez déjà oublié qui est responsable de la violence inhumaine et s'attendent à ce que vous la souteniez automatiquement. Cette résolution est une honte pour votre intelligence, une honte. Il est inimaginable qu'une résolution qui ne mentionne même pas le Hamas, puisse être votée ici. Réfléchissez-y, s'il vous plaît.

 Distingués représentants, le Hamas a perpétré des atrocités telles que nous n'en avons pas vues depuis l'Holocauste. Pourtant, contrairement à l'Holocauste, où les preuves que nous avons, sont principalement des photographies en noir et blanc et des images muettes. Ici, la preuve est en haute définition. Car une partie provient, oui, de caméras de sécurité israéliennes mais une grande partie provient aussi des téléphones portables et des caméras GoPro appartenant aux nazis du Hamas eux-mêmes. Beaucoup se demandent peut-être : pourquoi ils ont filmé cela ? Pourquoi ont-ils filmé leur violence sadique ? Eh bien, je vais vous dire pourquoi. Très simplement. Ils l'ont filmée pour terroriser le public israélien, pour diffuser ces vidéos et semer la peur dans le cœur des citoyens d'Israël. D'ailleurs, c'est ce que font les terroristes. Ils terrorisent.

 J'ai vu de nombreuses images au cours des dernières semaines qui resteront gravées à jamais dans ma mémoire, mais il y a une scène que je continue de voir lorsque j'essaie de dormir. Dans la vidéo, on peut voir un civil terriblement blessé, ensanglanté mais encore en vie, gisant par terre, tandis qu'un sauvage du Hamas, hurlant "Allahu Akbar" à répétition, frappe le cou de l'homme avec une binette de jardin dans le but de le décapiter. L'homme par terre est un travailleur agricole originaire de Thaïlande. Il n'est pas Israélien. Il n'est pas juif. Il était simplement en vie, essayant de subvenir aux besoins de sa famille. Mais il a été décapité avec un outil de jardinage émoussé.

Horrible. Israël n'est pas en guerre contre des êtres humains. Nous sommes en guerre contre des monstres. Voici la vidéo. Ma mission consiste à distribuer et à continuer de distribuer des codes QR avec un lien direct vers des fichiers où vous pouvez voir cette horreur et de nombreuses autres atrocités du Hamas. Ce que vous voyez ici ne sont pas des images d'Auschwitz mais des Israéliens violés, égorgés et brûlés vifs. Ce n'est pas Auschwitz. C'est le Hamas 

Il n'y a pas de mots dans la langue anglaise, dans aucune langue, pour décrire le mal que nous venons tous de voir. Et la raison pour laquelle il est indescriptible est parce qu'il n'a pas sa place parmi l'humanité. Plus de 1 400 personnes ont été massacrées, 1 000 pnt été blessées et plus de 220 otages sont actuellement détenus par des terroristes du Hamas ISIS. Dire que c'est le 11 septembre d'Israël serait un euphémisme. Proportionnellement, le bilan de morts de cette atrocité est 15 fois plus important que celui du 11 septembre.

 Au fait, nos ennemis ne sont pas à 7 000 miles de distance. Ils sont à 7 000 pieds, dans notre propre cour arrière. C'est pourquoi la mission d'Israël est d'éradiquer ce mal de la terre. Éradiquer. ISIS était l'État islamique d'Irak et de Syrie, et le Hamas est l'État islamique de Gaza. Donc, comme cela a été fait avec ISIS, le Hamas doit disparaître. Notre objectif est d'éliminer complètement les capacités du Hamas et nous utiliserons tous les moyens à notre disposition pour y parvenir. Pas par vengeance. Non. Pas par représailles. Non. Mais pour garantir que de telles dépravations, de telles atrocités ne se reproduisent jamais.

Israël est en première ligne dans la lutte contre le terrorisme djihadiste radical et, si Israël n'arrive pas à anéantir, à anéantir les capacités terroristes du Hamas, le monde entier en paiera le prix. L'idéologie génocidaire du Hamas, tout comme celle de l'ISIS, d'Al-Qaïda ou du régime des ayatollahs à Téhéran, en Iran, ne vise pas seulement à détruire Israël. Vous le savez tous. Il s'agit en fin de compte de la domination mondiale. La domination du monde. Il s'agit de mener la guerre sainte sur le sol de chacun de vos pays. Ils ne s'arrêteront pas tant qu'ils n'auront pas assassiné tous les infidèles comme ils nous appellent.

 Collègues, ces 16 dernières années, la communauté internationale et l'ONU ont été complaisantes face à l'expansion  terroriste du Hamas à Gaza. Complaisantes. Le monde a gardé la tête dans le sable alors que le Hamas cachait ses missiles et ses roquettes au sein de la population civile de Gaza. Il a accepté une réalité absurde selon laquelle une démocratie respectueuse des lois pourrait cohabiter avec des terroristes génocidaires qui tirent des dizaines de milliers de missiles de manière indiscriminée sur nos civils. Sans raison.

Nous avons constaté que rien ne peut changer l'idéologie génocidaire du Hamas. Ni, malheureusement, la réhabilitation de Gaza. Ni les incitations économiques. Ni aucune promesse d'un avenir meilleur. L'ONU a essayé. Beaucoup d'entre vous ont essayé. Mais tout le monde a échoué. Tout le monde a échoué. Et savez-vous pourquoi ? Parce que rien ne peut changer une idéologie génocidaire. Rien.

Il n'y a qu'une seule solution pour guérir d'un cancer. Et c'est l'éviscération de chaque cellule cancéreuse. La communauté internationale a versé des milliards de dollars dans la bande de Gaza. Et tout est allé à la machine de guerre du Hamas. Cela s'est dirigé vers leur ville souterraine de terreur. Cela s'est dirigé vers leurs installations de fabrication de missiles. Et vous vous souvenez, il y a 18 ans, Israël s'est retiré unilatéralement de toute la bande de Gaza. Nous nous sommes retirés de toute la bande de Gaza. Le Hamas aurait pu investir les fonds internationaux qu'il a reçus dans la construction de centrales électriques, de stations de dessalement de l'eau et de toute autre infrastructure civile. Mais non. Au lieu de cela, le Hamas a exploité chaque pouce de la bande de Gaza pour ses objectifs violents. Parce que, pour le Hamas, les civils gazaouis ne sont rien de plus que de la simples chair à canon. Des boucliers humains qui, dans la mort, deviennent des pions pour la campagne diffamatoire du Hamas envers Israël. Le Hamas compte sur vous. Ils sont certains qu'en dépit de la terreur et des massacres, l'ONU viendra encore à leur rescousse et empêchera Israël de se défendre.

Amis, Israël est en mission de sauvetage. Une mission pour sauver nos otages, pour sauver notre avenir, et pour sauver le peuple de Gaza de leurs tyrans sauvages. Une mission de sauvetage. Et mes collègues, la mission de sauvetage peut se terminer rapidement. Maintenant. Elle peut se terminer maintenant. Pas besoin de résolutions compliquées et vides. Elle peut se terminer maintenant. Si le Hamas pose les armes, nous rend nos otages et se livre, cette guerre prendra fin sans un seul coup de feu supplémentaire. Pas un seul. Pourquoi ne vous unissez-vous pas et ne demandez-vous pas cela au Hamas ? Si les auteurs de cette résolution veulent vraiment la paix, s'ils veulent vraiment une solution immédiate, pourquoi ne le demandent-ils pas au Hamas ?

Au contraire, cette résolution fait exactement le contraire de trouver une solution. Exactement le contraire. Plutôt que de promouvoir la paix, elle ne fait que garantir plus de violence. Elle devrait s'appeler "Unir pour le terrorisme" et non pas "Unir pour la paix". Israël a été attaqué et continue d'être attaqué. C'est un fait en ce moment, dans le sud par le Hamas et dans le nord par le Hezbollah. Pendant ce temps, la résolution appelle à un cessez-le-feu immédiat. Un cessez-le-feu signifie donner du temps au Hamas pour se réarmer afin qu'ils puissent nous massacrer à nouveau. Ce n'est pas de la spéculation. Ils le feront. Vous le savez tous. Tout appel à un cessez-le-feu n'est pas une tentative de paix. C'est une tentative de lier les mains d'Israël, nous empêchant d'éliminer une énorme menace pour nos citoyens.

 Mais les distorsions de la résolution vont encore plus loin que cela. Le Hamas, le groupe terroriste qui a déclenché cette guerre, je répète, n'est même pas mentionné. Pas une seule fois. En fait, la seule référence cachée à ces terroristes barbares peut être trouvée dans les appels aux deux parties. Les deux parties ? C'est une comparaison fausse et immorale entre la démocratie respectueuse de la loi d'Israël et un djihadisme génocidaire. Et les rédacteurs comptent sur le fait que chaque représentant distingué ici suivra aveuglément leur manœuvre. Cette résolution est une insulte à votre intelligence. Et le seul endroit où cette résolution devrait se trouver, c'est dans la poubelle de l'histoire. La poubelle de l'histoire.

 Mais chers collègues, cette résolution n'est pas la seule chose ici aujourd'hui qui est détachée de la réalité. Dans un court laps de temps, un représentant du régime maléfique qui a formé, financé et armé le Hamas pour le massacre du 7 octobre prendra la parole devant vous. Le régime des ayatollahs en Iran a du sang de milliers d'Israéliens sur les mains. Il a du sang de centaines de milliers d'Iraniens opprimés, d'Ukrainiens, d'Américains, d'Émiratis et de tant d'autres sur les mains. L'Iran est connu comme le principal sponsor d'État du terrorisme dans le monde. Et pour de bonnes raisons. Il est tout à fait naturel que le ministre des Affaires étrangères de ce régime brutal soit le prochain orateur après le rédacteur de la résolution. Le pays avec une idéologie nazie visant à annihiler Israël déclare publiquement qu'il se tient aux côtés de son mandataire, le Hamas, qui partage la même idéologie nazie et vise notre destruction. Cela est tout à fait compréhensible. En effet, il y a quelques jours à peine, il a parlé aux dirigeants du Hamas et de son groupe terroriste jumeau, le Jihad islamique palestinien, les louant pour le massacre. Et aujourd'hui, il est ici pour empoisonner vos oreilles. En effet, il unit pour la paix, s'unissant pour massacrer chaque Israélien en morceaux. Cet homme, le tueur de masse ou tout autre représentant du régime terroriste en Iran, n'a pas sa place à l'ONU, encore moins dans la famille des Nations. C'est une tache morale sur l'ONU et les valeurs sur lesquelles elle a été fondée.

 Chers collègues distingués, cette semaine, l'ONU a célébré son 78e anniversaire. Pourtant, en regardant cette résolution et les invités d'honneur accueillis aujourd'hui dans ces halls, cette organisation a montré qu'elle est si défaillante, si moralement corrompue, que je n'ai pas beaucoup d'espoir qu'elle atteigne 90 ans, encore moins 100. Je suis simplement réaliste. Aujourd'hui prouve clairement que cet organe est en train de perdre sa pertinence, sa légitimité et sa justification. Ce que nous voyons aujourd'hui est une profanation, une profanation de ce que l'ONU était censée être. Après les horreurs de l'Holocauste, cette institution a été créée pour empêcher que les atrocités ne se répètent. Pourtant, dans ces mêmes halls, nous avons des auteurs des violations les plus grotesques des droits de l'homme et des crimes contre l'humanité qui exploitent également leur pouvoir et les soi-disant membres de la famille des Nations uniquement pour cibler les démocraties respectueuses de la loi comme Israël.

 Si cette organisation veut maintenir ne serait-ce qu'une once de légitimité, il est impératif, je vous en prie, chers représentants distingués, de ne plus jouer le jeu de cette farce de double standard anti-Israël.

 Votez contre cette résolution biaisée. Tenez-vous du bon côté de l'histoire. Ne vous rangez pas du côté des djihadistes génocidaires qui sont déterminés à vous détruire. Élevez-vous au-dessus des considérations politiques internes et faites ce qui est moral et juste.

Monsieur le Président, Israël ne cessera pas de se battre pour la vérité, même si nous restons la seule voix de la raison dans ces enceintes. Israël continuera de combattre les terroristes génocidaires déterminés à notre destruction. Nous ne nous reposerons pas tant que le Hamas ne sera pas anéanti et que nos otages ne seront pas rentrés chez eux. Et nous les ramènerons chez eux.

 J'achèverai par un moment de silence en hommage à toutes les victimes de l'atrocité du Hamas. Si les partisans de cette résolution choisissent d'ignorer les victimes dans leur texte, moi je rendrai hommage à leur mémoire.

 Merci, Monsieur le Président.

 

Gilad Erdan’s speech at the UN General Assembly

 

Gilad Erdan is Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations  

Many thanks to Rami Pinku for generating the transcript by sending the extracted audio with his Python code to OpenAI 

Thank you, Mr. President. 

Distinguished colleagues, we are gathered here in this hall today as a result of a resolution called Uniting for Peace. Sadly, this emergency session has nothing to do with peace. Every member state here today who is convinced that we are about to discuss yet another round of conflict in the Middle East, another dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, is wrong. 

The October 7th massacre and what ensued has nothing to do with the Palestinians, nothing. It has nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Palestinian question. This is not a war with the Palestinians. Israel is at war with the genocidal jihadist Hamas terror organization. Only. It is the law-abiding democracy of Israel against modern-day Nazis. Nazis. 

These are the facts. Hamas do not care about the Palestinian people. They do not care about peace or dialogue. Hamas has only one goal - to annihilate Israel and murder every single Jew on the face of the earth. Their original charter makes this very clear. I'll read you a few lines:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it. 

Another quote. 

There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by jihad.

 Another quote. 

The day of judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.

 Friends, on October 7th it became clear to the entire world that Hamas's charter was not a compilation of empty words. It was an action plan. An action plan. 

Imagine a bright sunny day, clear skies, music in the air, young people are dancing, a rave, a concert for peace. Yes, for peace. It is really, it is early morning on the holy Sabbath. The sun has just risen to mark a new day. It is also a festive Jewish high holiday, Simchat Torah. Simchat Torah means the joy of the Torah where we celebrate the book of books, our holy Bible. And then in one split second this idyllic Eden became hell on earth. The peaceful morning air was pierced with the wail of rocket sirens. Thousands, I'm telling you, thousands of Hamas mortars and rockets rained down indiscriminately on many Israeli cities and villages. 

But the rockets were only cover for the pogrom, the pogrom that followed. Barbaric Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from the sea, the land, and the air. They came with one purpose, one purpose only, to savagely murder every living thing they encountered. Hamas Nazi murders went from house to house with hit lists, a thoroughly planned, willful, premeditated attack. They brutally murdered civilians in their beds. They drove pickup trucks with machine guns. Yes, we all remember, just like ISIS and fired blindly at hundreds of young people at a concert. 300, 300 were burned alive or butchered in that concert. Much of what remained were clumps of flesh and bloody limbs. Parents had to bring their children's toothbrushes for DNA so they could so they could figure out whose limb belonged to who.

These Hamas monsters raped women and children, parading naked girls that they raped and bodied that they defiled through the streets of Gaza while thousands, and I'm telling you thousands, you can see the footage, jeered and cheered. The savages tortured small babies. Just like the Nazis, Hamas terrorists removed infants from their cribs. Yes, we have it on video. Swung them repeatedly against the ground until their skulls became a pulp. Children were murdered in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. I've seen a video of a terrorist filmed by him, by himself, who tossed a grenade into a bomb shelter with a father and his two young boys inside. The father was killed instantly and the two boys ran out of the shelter screaming that their father is dead and that they want to be dead too. All this is occurring, believe it or not, as the monster who murdered their father calmly helps himself to the contents of the family's fridge. 

Yes, no horror movie compares to the pure brutality that Hamas carried out. No, none. 

Amit Mann, a 22-year-old from Kibbutz Be'eri and a paramedic for Magen David Adom, Israel's Red Cross. She dedicated her life, literally, and you will understand why, to saving others. When the Hamas monsters invaded the Kibbutz, Amit ran to the clinic to treat as many wounded as she could. For hours, hours, Amit worked non-stop trying to save lives. She knew the sadistic terrorists were outside her clinic because she heard the gunfire, but she stayed there. She was committed to saving lives, not running away. Finally, the terrorist burst into her clinic and put a bullet, a bullet, through her brain. She was a Magen David Adom paramedic, the Israeli Red Cross, in uniform, but that didn't stop these savages. This is how the rescue teams found Amit. 

Ambulances were set on fire, not one, many. Dozens of Magen David Adom medical teams were intentionally targeted on the way to tend to the wounded, and many other paramedics were murdered. Barzilai Hospital in my hometown city, Ashkelon, in Israel, suffered direct hits from Hamas rockets, not for the first time. Hamas has been deliberately firing rockets at it for years, for years, intentionally, yet not a single condemnation of this barbarity has been mentioned here. Not here, not by the Security Council, not by the Secretary General and not by this absurd resolution. It seems that hospitals and medical teams only need to be protected as long as they are not Israeli.

 The hypocrisy is beyond belief, beyond belief. 

The brutal ISIS-like monsters abducted over 220 hostages from Israel and dozens of other countries, including babies, babies, children, persons with disabilities, the elderly and Holocaust survivors. Kfir Bibas, Kfir Bibas is nine months old, nine months old, and he is being held right now in Gaza as a hostage, nine months old. What barbaric terrorists can do such a thing? And together with him, 30 other children, 30 other children. We saw Hamas's brutality in Israel. I cannot begin to fathom what horrors the hostages are enduring right now as we speak here. Twenty days have gone by and Israel is still counting her dead. It took weeks to collect all of the bodies. Some bodies are burnt like pieces of coal. It is almost impossible to identify them. 

Countless burned bodies have been found with ash in their throats, meaning they were still alive, still alive when lit on fire, intentionally, by the Hamas terrorists. A clump of charred human remains that was burned beyond recognition was found. At first, the medical personnel couldn't figure out what they were looking at. Yet, after a CT scan, it became clear that they were two spines, not one, two spines bound together with wire, one belonging to an adult and the other, the small spine of a child. So just try to imagine that parents feeling as they and their child were burning alive, burning alive. The painful screaming of the love of their life was the last thing they heard, the last thing. 

Do you not think it's unbelievable that this resolution here today and this session are not solely focused on Hamas's atrocities? When reading this resolution, Hamas seems to be missing in action. The drafters of the resolution claim to be concerned about peace. Yet, the depraved murderers who initiated this war are not even mentioned in the resolution, not even mentioned. They see each one of you as a puppet. They write a resolution completely devoid of any content related to the situation. They assume that you have already forgotten who it is that is responsible for the inhumane violence, and they just expect you to support it automatically. This resolution is a disgrace to your intelligence, a disgrace. It is unfathomable that such a resolution, one that doesn't even mention Hamas, could possibly be voted upon here. Let that sink in, please. 

Distinguished representatives, Hamas carried out atrocities, the likes of which we have not seen since the Holocaust. Yet, unlike the Holocaust, where the evidence we have is mostly black and white photographs and soundless footage, here, the proof is in high definition. Because some of it is from, yes, security footage, but much of it is from the cell phones and GoPro cameras belonging to the Hamas Nazis themselves. Many may be asking, why did they film this? Why did they film their sadistic violence? Well, I'll tell you why. Very simple. They filmed it in order to terrorize the Israeli public, to release these videos and put fear in the hearts of the citizens of Israel. By the way, this is what terrorists do. They terrorize.

 I have seen much footage over the past weeks that will be seared into my mind forever, but there is one sight that I keep on seeing when I try to sleep. In the video, one can see a terrible injured civilian, bloodied yet alive, laying on the ground as a Hamas savage, screaming Allahu Akbar repeatedly, pummels the man's neck with a garden hoe in order to decapitate him. The man on the ground is an agricultural worker from Thailand. He's not Israeli. He's not Jewish. He was merely alive, trying to make a living for his family. But he was decapitated with a blunt gardening tool. 

Horrifying. Israel is not at war with human beings. We are at war with monsters. Here is the video. My mission distributed and will continue to distribute QR codes with a direct link to files where you can see this horror and many other Hamas atrocities. What you see here are not pictures from Auschwitz, but Israelis raped, butchered, and burned alive. This is not Auschwitz. This is Hamas. 

There are no words in the English language, in any language, to describe the evil that we all just witnessed. And the reason it is not describable is because it has no place among humankind. Over 1,400 have been slaughtered, 1,000 injured, and over 220 hostages are being held right now by Hamas ISIS terrorists. To say that this is Israel's 9-11 would be an understatement. Proportionally, the death toll of this atrocity is 15 times bigger than 9-11. 

By the way, our enemies are not 7,000 miles away. They are 7,000 feet away in our own backyard. So for this reason, Israel's mission is to eradicate this evil from the earth. Eradicate. ISIS was the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and Hamas is the Islamic State of Gaza. So just as was done with ISIS, Hamas must be no more. Our goal is to completely eradicate Hamas's capabilities, and we will use every mean at our disposal to accomplish this. Not for revenge. No. Not for retaliation. No. But to ensure that such depravity, such atrocities never occur again. 

Israel is at the forefront of the war on radical jihadist terror, and if Israel doesn't succeed in obliterating, obliterating Hamas's terror capabilities, the whole world will pay the price. Hamas's genocidal ideology, just like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or the Ayatollah regime in Tehran, of Iran, is not just about destroying Israel. You all know it. It is ultimately about world domination. World. It is about bringing the jihad war to the soil of each and every one of your countries. They will not stop until they murder all of the infidels, as they call us. 

Colleagues, for the past 16 years, the international community and the UN have been complacent to Hamas's terror buildup in Gaza. Complacent. The world has kept its head in the sand as Hamas embedded its missiles and rockets deep within and under the civilian population of Gaza. It accepted an absurd reality that a law-abiding democracy could live side by side with cancerous genocidal terrorists that fire tens of thousands of missiles indiscriminately at our civilians. Unprovoked. 

We have seen that nothing can change Hamas's genocidal ideology. Not, sadly, not the rehabilitation of Gaza. Not economic incentives. Not any promise of a brighter future. The UN tried. Many of you tried. But everyone failed. Everyone failed. And you know why? Because nothing can change a genocidal ideology. Nothing.

 There is only one solution to curing a cancer. And it is the evisceration of every cancerous cell. The international community has poured billions of dollars into Gaza. And it all went to Hamas's war machine. It went to its subterranean city of terror. It went to its missile manufacturing facilities. And you remember, 18 years ago, Israel unilaterally withdrew from all of Gaza. We withdrew from all of Gaza. Hamas could have invested the international funding it received into building power plants, water desalination plants, every other civil infrastructure. But no. Instead, Hamas exploited every inch of the Gaza Strip for their violent goals. Because to Hamas, Gazan civilians are nothing more than mere cannon fodder. Human shields, who in death become pawns for Hamas's libelous propaganda campaign. 

Hamas is counting on you. They are certain that despite the terror and massacre, the UN will still come to their rescue and prevent Israel from defending itself. 

Friends, Israel is on a rescue mission. A rescue mission to save our hostages, to save our future, and to save the people of Gaza from their savage tyrants. A rescue mission. And colleagues, the rescue mission can end quickly. Now. It can end now. No need for complicated, empty resolutions. It can end now. Should Hamas put down their arms, return our hostages, and turn themselves in, this war will end without one more shot being fired. Not even one. Why do you not unite and call on Hamas to do this? If the drafters of this resolution truly want peace, if they truly want an immediate solution, then why do they not demand this of Hamas? 

Instead, this resolution does the exact opposite of finding a solution. The exact opposite. Rather than promoting peace, it only ensures more violence. It should be called uniting for terror, not uniting for peace. Israel has been attacked and continues to be attacked. This is a fact right now in the south from Hamas and in the north from Hezbollah. Meanwhile, the resolution calls for an immediate ceasefire. A ceasefire means giving Hamas time to rearm itself so they can massacre us again. This is not speculation. They will do so. You all know this. Any call for a ceasefire is not an attempt at peace. It is an attempt to tie Israel's hands, preventing us from eliminating a huge threat to our citizens. 

But the resolution's distortions go even deeper than that. Hamas, the terror group that started this war, I reiterate, is not even mentioned. Not even once. In fact, the only hidden reference to these barbaric terrorists can be found in calls on both parties. Both parties? This is a false, immoral comparison between the law-abiding democracy of Israel and a genocidal jihadist. And the drafters are counting on the fact that each and every distinguished representative here will blindly go along with their ploy. This resolution is an insult to your intelligence. And the only place this resolution belongs is in the dustbin of history. The dustbin of history. 

But colleagues, this resolution is not the only thing here today that is detached from reality. In a short time, a representative of the evil regime that trained, funded, and armed Hamas for the October 7th massacre will address you. The Ayatollah regime of Iran has the blood of thousands of Israelis on its hands. It has the blood of hundreds of thousands of oppressed Iranians, of Ukrainians, of Americans, of Emiratis, and so many others on its hands. Iran is known as the world's number one state sponsor of terror. And for good reasons. It's completely natural that the foreign minister of this brutal regime should be the speaker following the resolution drafter. The country with a Nazi ideology of annihilating Israel, publicly says, stands in solidarity with its proxy Hamas, which shares the same Nazi ideology and aims for our destruction. This is completely understandable. Indeed, mere days ago, he spoke with the leaders of Hamas and its twin terror group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, praising them, praising them for the slaughter. And today he is here to fill your ears with poison. Indeed, uniting for peace, uniting to butcher every Israeli to pieces. This man, the mass murderer or any other representative of the terror regime in Iran, has no place at the UN, let alone in the family of nations. It is a moral stain on the UN and the values it was founded upon. 

Distinguished colleagues, this week the UN celebrated its 78th birthday. Yet, looking at this resolution and the honorary guests hosted today in these halls, this organization has shown that it is so broken, so morally corrupt, that I do not have high hopes that it will make it to 90, let alone 100. I'm just a realist. Today serves as the clearest proof that this body is bleeding its relevance, legitimacy and justification. What we are witnessing today is a desecration, a desecration of what the UN was meant to be. Following the horrors of the Holocaust, this institution was established to prevent atrocities from repeating themselves. Yet, in these very halls, we have perpetrators of the most grotesque human rights violations and crimes against humanity who also exploit their power and so-called members of the family of nations only to single out law-abiding democracies such as Israel. If this organization wants to maintain any shred of legitimacy, it is imperative that you, please, distinguished representatives, no longer play along with this farce of anti-Israel double standards. Vote against this biased resolution. 

Stand on the right side of history. Don't stand with the genocidal jihadists committed to your destruction. Rise above internal political considerations and do what is moral and right. 

Mr. President, Israel will not stop fighting for the truth, even if we remain the sole voice of reason in these halls. Israel will continue combating the genocidal terrorists committed to our destruction. We will not rest until Hamas is obliterated and our hostages are returned home. And we will bring them home.

I will conclude with a moment of silence for all the victims of Hamas's atrocity. If the supporters of this resolution choose to ignore the victims in their text, I will pay respect to their memory.  

Thank you, Mr President.