"Hamas' actions and the Government of Israel's response in Gaza in no way advance peace," they wrote. What peace? Israel is not remotely interested in peace with terrorists who for nearly 20 years have been firing rockets into Israel.

The slaughter of 1,200 Israelis plus 200 who were taken into captivity is not a recipe for peace. Israel is doing its best to abide by international law in its war on terror, Hamas is not remotely interested in abiding by anything, especially international law. Their use of fellow Gazans as human shields and using hospitals as centers for command posts is despicable, especially when Israel has offered the hospitals back door ways to get out and fuel to keep the lights on, which Hamas has said the hospitals cannot have.

Putting the onus on Israel amounts to deeply held animus and prejudice if not hatred towards a democratically run state. Furthermore, collateral damage is always a part of war. Did Churchill consider this when he bombed Dresden and Berlin. Did anyone even ask the question?

"Unrelenting military assault has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 4,000 children, and includes the destruction of hospitals, churches, mosques, cultural centers, and other civilian infrastructure throughout Gaza. The lives of all people, be they Israelis or Palestinians, must be protected," said the Christian leaders.

Israel has repeatedly offered to clear roads to move the population south. Many took it, many have not. To my knowledge no hospital has taken a direct hit, and one wall of a church caved in. Israel has said that the rockets fired came from Hamas not them, but the world does not want to believe that. Israel is the target of their hatred. Tunnels, however, were found under hospitals.

The chant "from the river to the sea," is code for the extermination of Jews. It is ugly and the American politician who uttered it should be tossed out. It is laced with genocidal intent.

What if you changed the Palestinian slogan, "Israel from the sea to the river" and see how Palestinians feel. Israel is made to feel isolated and alone surrounded by nations who hate her.

Would the world yell and scream if Hamas were winning the war aided and abetted by Hezbollah, the Palestinian authority and Iran. No such calls for restraint from the UN would be heard, there would be a deadly silence.

Around the globe we see Jew hatred rearing its ugly head. It signals a threat to democracy, with democracy historically now in trouble. The real problem is the corroding of democratic institutions and sensibilities and Jews are among the first scapegoats. When things go wrong people look for a scapegoat and Jews are an easy target.

Across the US Jew hatred has gone unchecked on campuses. Hatred of Jews is being conflated with political speech. Germany is a signpost of how antisemitism worked. From Kristallnacht to the gas chambers was only two short years.

America is experiencing a tsunami of antisemitism, but it can lead the world in repudiating antisemitism. A rally in London, attended by King Charles surrounded by pro-Palestinian mobs revealed how important it is not to cave into economic blackmail, oil spikes or international political machinations. Hundreds of thousands of these pro-Palestinians marched in London, overshadowing poppy day remembering the veterans of World War I.

The rebuke of Jews and Israel by the world is all one-sided. Israel is made to feel isolated and alone surrounded by nations who hate her. Americans don't need AR-15s, but who would blame the Knesset if it passed a law allowing every Israeli to be armed to prevent what happening.

Another fallacy is the oft-repeated mantra is the "decades long occupation and blockade of the Gaza strip." Israel, a democratic government walked out of Gaza in 2005 forcibly removing Israeli settlers. Gaza chose Hamas to rule them and they became the prisoners of the terrorist organization. Had they had a democratic govt. Gaza would have flourished like Qatar with tourist-driven hotels and much more.

Money that flowed into Gaza from Arab nations only lined the pockets of Hamas, it did little or nothing for the people. Pipes for the transmission of water were used to build rockets. If there are no safe places in Gaza it is because Hamas has laced the area with tunnels, even under hospitals endangering ordinary Gaza citizens. Israel did not build those tunnels.

Much more food, water, medicine, electricity, and fuel supplies than are currently provided must reach all the people of Gaza now, say the Christian leaders. Israel has offered much of this but it has been stymied by Hamas leaders who have forbidden Gazans from moving south and connecting to those supplies.

The leaders want a swift end to the war, but unless Hamas releases all the hostages that will not happen. In the end they may die alongside their Hamas captives in tunnels of darkness. Humanitarian issues goes both ways, which the leaders overlook.

The leaders want to "demilitarize the conflict" and to deny arms to Israel and call for a ceasefire. This is a dream scenario for Iran and Hezbollah, not to mention an armed Palestinian West Bank.

"We urge you to recognize that the root causes of suffering must be addressed so that, when this current crisis is over, we do not witness a return to an unsustainable status quo. It is not enough to stop the current fighting." True and one way is to stop Hamas ever firing another rocket into Israel is to eliminate Hamas.

If anyone had any doubts about a successful two-state solution, it is dead on arrival.

But around the world Jewish voices are being raised against the growing chorus to disarm Israel and end the war. South Africa's chief Rabbi cried out; "You are Iran's useful idiots". You can see him here:
https://anglicanmainstream.org/you-are-irans-useful-idiots-south-africas-chief-rabbi/

Two African American faith leaders say despite the perception of some that the Black Church in America has been silent in defense of Israel amid its war with Hamas, they and other black pastors are refuting claims that Israel is a racist, apartheid state.

In an op-ed for The Christian Post, Pastor Michael A. Stevens argued that the black Church has been largely silent on Hamas' Oct. 7 massacre against Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,400 people, a majority of whom were civilians, including over 30 Americans.

"Unfortunately, many African American pastors and leaders have a mixed level of apathy and resistance toward Israel as well as empathy for the Palestinian struggle, often making a comparison to the civil rights era," Stevens wrote. "To add, some consider the African American community to be the most anti-Semitic group in America today." You can read more here: https://www.christianpost.com/news/black-pastors-encourage-churches-to-defend-

Don't be fooled by March for Peace: https://unherd.com/2023/11/dont-be-fooled-by-the-march-for-peace/

America can lead the world in repudiating antisemitism. It must not cave into economic blackmail, oil spikes or international political machinations.

Christians, especially Christians, must repudiate antisemitism; resist being called Islamophobic and think what they fought against 80 years ago.

Please take the time to read this long but eloquently written and heartbreaking letter from a teacher/professor.

This is a heartbreaking post from a Canadian University Professor who teaches biblical studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, in Canada. I believe his or her name has been withheld for his/ her personal safety.

Dear Students,

I have spent the last 25 years showing you the beauty of all of the literary, cultural, philosophical, and artistic heights of the human spirit over the course of human history. Teaching you has been the most wonderful and satisfying of callings. I never wanted to do anything other than meet with you, discuss ideas with you, discover and rediscover human insights, truths, and wonders. I never regretted my career path, never hated my job, and never doubted my legacy. I felt privileged and honoured to show you how to analyse, to think critically, to weigh evidence, and to understand people and ideas, contexts and complexity, deeply and thoroughly. I thought my work was helping to make the world a better, more humane, more thoughtful place.

You have broken my heart. No: shattered it, irreparably. I don't know how I will ever set foot in a classroom again. I don't know how I will ever see you the same way. I know now that I was deluding myself that I ever had any impact, would ever leave any positive legacy, that my work ever made any difference.

I watch you all on social media, in the streets and the quads, marching in solidarity with a movement that seeks only to wipe me out. To exterminate me, my children, my parents, my entire family and community. I know, some of you think you're trying to help the oppressed.

You think that my kind is the white colonialist racist kind that you hate. But I thought I taught you how to evaluate arguments. I thought I taught you the importance of understanding context, both historical and rhetorical.

I thought that I taught you that the world did not operate according to dichotomies, like black and white, oppressor and oppressed, villain and victim. I thought I taught you about complexity, about judgment, and to examine your sources and not to take anyone's statements at face value.

Zionism is the Jewish right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. Israel is that ancestral homeland. Jews are the indigenous peoples of that land; not the only indigenous peoples of that land, to be sure. But Israel is the only land to which we are indigenous. After 2000 years of longing, the result of the Holocaust -- a Nazi movement which sought to ethnically cleanse the world of Jews by systematically exterminating us -- was that the international community granted us a sliver of that ancestral homeland. It was to be shared, partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state.

The Arabs rejected the partition and attacked the Jews when they declared the state of Israel in 1948. The Jews won. Arabs who remained in Israel became citizens with full rights and freedoms. 20% of Israel's population today is Arab. They fight in the army, they are doctors, lawyers, members of Parliament and supreme court judges.

There is no apartheid. Israel's Jewish population consists of Jews from Arab lands, whose parents or grandparents were kicked out when the state of Israel was formed, and of descendants of refugees from Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors who had no homes to return to. Some are more recent refugees from Europe, Russia, and the Americas who either returned to Israel for religious reasons or because the Jew-hatred in their communities grew too excessive and they decided to emigrate, to head for the one place in the world Jews can go if their neighbours or governments turn against them.

The West Bank and Gaza strip -- along with refugee camps that still exist in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan -- were the places that the Arab nations who attacked Israel at its founding told the Arabs living in Palestine (later to be known as Palestinians) to flee. It was supposed to be temporary, because the plan was to "push the Jews into the sea." When the plan didn't work out, all of these states refused to absorb the Palestinians.

They wanted to keep them in camps because they still planned to annihilate Israel and the Jews that lived there and then the Palestinians could return. The West Bank was in Jordan and Gaza was in Egypt until 1967, when the Arab states tried again to push the Jews into the sea. Their failure this time ended with Israel capturing these territories. When Israel tried to exchange land for peace and give Gaza back to Egypt, Egypt didn't want it.

And so the territories remained in Israel. In 2005 Israel pulled out of Gaza and left it to govern itself. Most of the West Bank is also self-governing, but not all because of the high number of suicide bombers and other threats to Israel's existence fomenting there, so Israel hasn't been able to fully remove itself. The current awful Israeli government has allowed religious fanatics, "settlers," to build settlements there, which makes everything worse.

And you see what I did there? I criticized Israel's government. I can do that, and still support the existence of a Jewish state in our ancestral homeland.

When you say "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," this is a call to ethnic cleansing of Jews from their homeland, from the only state in the entire Middle East that would look remotely familiar to you in terms of basic rights and freedoms and a democratic system if you were to visit the region. When Hamas supporters -- like those who led you all in a rally on my home campus today -- talk about Jews as "occupiers," they don't mean Gaza. They mean the whole state of Israel. They want Jews eradicated from the entire land. Hamas actually wants us gone from the whole world, as they have stated many times. Who are the Nazis now?

But here I am, teaching again. I can't help myself. I wish that you cared what I had to say. I wish that some knowledge, some context, some understanding, could reach beyond the slogans and chants for my death that you are repeating mindlessly and endlessly as you march to the beat of hatred across the tattered remains of my broken soul.

Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the head of the Chabad movement from 1950 until his death in 1994, came to the United States from East Europe in 1941. He sometime thereafter declared that America was a medinah shel chesed, "a righteous country." I wonder if he would say that today, watching campuses light up for the so-called state of Palestine.

No. A ceasefire called for by these Christian leaders would only work to the advantage of Hamas. It serves no useful purpose for the Israelis who are seeking to exterminate them. A pause yes, but any halt only works for Hamas to regroup and kill Israeli troops. Netanyahu knows this and he will not be persuaded by world opinion (or Christian leaders) however much it goes against Israel. Never again means exactly that; never again.

END