Feb. 20: A Grisly Coffin Parade Shows Why Gaza Must Be Cleared Out

10% of Americans now LGBTQ; The Hamas to Reddit pipeline; Will Trump cut the Pentagon?

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The Big Story

This morning, Hamas returned the bodies of Oded Lifshitz and Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas to Israel. But the story was the manner of the return, which was macabre and infuriating even by the low standards of the Palestinian “resistance.” The following newsreel, from Britain’s Sky News, samples a handful of the videos of the handover ceremony in Gaza’s Khan Younis that circulated on X and Telegram Thursday morning:

Note the whistles from the crowd, and the crowd itself. And the photo behind the stage:

Still images of the black coffins, borne by pallbearers from not only Hamas but also Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), showed them stamped with a photo of the deceased and a “date of arrest”—Oct. 7, 2023—along with an image of the “war criminal” Benjamin Netanyahu. The Times of Israel reports that PIJ released a propaganda video to go along with today’s exchange, showing the group’s operatives digging up the grave of Lifshitz and placing his body in a coffin littered with “propaganda messages blaming Israel for his death” and topped with a map labeled “We will not give up a centimeter of Palestine.”

Israelis, and supporters of Israel abroad, were understandably angered by the spectacle. “Hamas is not a resistance movement,” said David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesman. “Hamas is a death cult that murders, that tortures and parades dead bodies.” In remarks to the public, Netanyahu quoted from Psalm 94—“O God show vengeance”—and promised to “settle the score” with the Hamas “murderers.” Other Israeli officials echoed the boss with fire-and-brimstone rhetoric of their own. The coffin parade was too much even for the United Nations, which said it “broke international law.”

But the declarations of outrage, promises of revenge, etc., do not appear to be adding up to much in practical terms. Contrary to scattered reports that Netanyahu had cancelled the cease-fire deal, Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer met today to discuss phase two of the deal with Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. Remarks from Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, while rich in invective against the “horrific and repulsive spectacle of twisted and monstrous minds” in Khan Younis, suggested that the Israelis are continuing to backtrack from President Trump’s proposal to “clear out” Gaza. Instead, Sa’ar emphasized the familiar themes of deradicalization and disarmament, with the option of voluntary emigration for those who want to escape the “hell of Gaza.” “The entire Palestinian society must undergo a deep process of de-radicalization and break away from the poison of incitement and the ethos of terrorism,” Sa’ar wrote on X—you know, because culturally reprogramming 1.8 million people is much easier and more humane than moving them two miles across a border. Gaza will also have to be “completely demilitarized,” according to Sa’ar, which is exactly what a new Arab alternative to Trump’s plan, reported in Walla, calls for.

This is a bad idea. It will not work, and worse, it makes Israel look weak, indecisive, and foolish, which is bad at all times but especially bad under Trump. Yes, the coffin parade was barbaric, and it is natural for people to respond to it with anger and outrage. But scouring the thesaurus for new synonyms for “evil” is not going to change minds. Those who back Israel already know what Hamas is. Those who oppose it know and do not care. Those in the middle are sick of hearing about it and have already flipped channels to the Trump Show.

Trump has said what he wants, repeatedly—over the objections of the Arabs, the peace process blob, the “international community,” and members of his administration. He has offered the Israelis a chance to solve their Gaza problem. They should take it. Good deals don’t stay on the table forever.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Liel Leibovitz on what Israel needs to do in Gaza

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The Rest

→Nearly 1 in 10 Americans, and a quarter of Gen Z, are “queer,” according to a Gallup survey of more than 14,000:

To be more specific, 9.3% of Americans now identify as queer, nearly double the figure of 5.3% in 2020 and more than double the 4.5% in 2017. Among Gen Z adults (age 18-27), 23.7% identify as queer, compared to 14% of millennials and less than 5% of older generations. LGBTQ identification also strongly tracks political ideology, with 21% of liberals identifying as non-heterosexual versus 3% of conservatives.

We suspect the rapid rise in queer identification is mostly a matter of labeling. The New York Times notes that the increase is largely driven by young women calling themselves “bisexual.” Thirty-one percent of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ, but that figure is a mostly a product of the 23% of who say they are bisexual, compared to only 8% of Gen Z men. (Previous studies have suggested that 80% or more of bisexual women exclusively date men.) The survey also found that 5.9% of Gen Z women called themselves “lesbian,” versus 3.6% of Gen Z men who called themselves gay, despite historical survey data consistently showing more gay men than lesbian women. On the other hand, transgender identity is still on the rise: The share of U.S. adults calling themselves “transgender” more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, from 0.6% to 1.3%.

→A pro-Palestine Discord server is coordinating the spread of Axis of Resistance propaganda on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, X, Wikipedia, and other social media platforms and using these to “data poison” search engines and large language model (LLM) AI tools such as ChatGPT, according to an investigation from Ashley Rindsberg at Pirate Wires. The mechanics here are somewhat complex, but in essence, the scheme works like this: A Discord server called r/Palestine (and a subreddit of the same name) sources terrorist propaganda from a Samidoun-aligned Telegram channel called Resistance News Network, which publishes translated communiques, press releases, etc., from terror groups such as Hamas, the PFLP, the Houthis, and Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah. The Discord server then acts as a “command and control” center directing its members to spread the information not only on far-left and anti-Israel subreddits but also on nonpolitical subreddits with large user bases, posting and upvoting the network’s propaganda while mass-downvoting pro-Israel content in what are known as “brigade” attacks. (There’s also an appearance in the article by old Scroll regular @Zei_Squirrel, who helps coordinate “brigade” attacks on X’s Community Notes.)

There’s a lot more in there on the mechanics of the operation, but as Rindsberg notes, the problem goes beyond Reddit and X, since this social media manipulation in turn influences search and AI tools. Google signed a $60 million deal with Reddit last year for access to Reddit’s API for LLM training purposes, and OpenAI trains ChatGPT in part on Reddit comments that have received at least three upvotes. Google search, meanwhile, frequently includes Reddit posts among its top search results; Rindsberg writes that when he googled hostage collage (a grid of hostage photos presented by Israel at the International Court of Justice), a top result was a r/Palestine post claiming that the Israelis had inserted “duplicate photos.”

Read the rest here: https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-terrorist-propaganda-to-reddit-pipeline

→Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has instructed Pentagon leaders to draw up plans to cut defense spending by 8% for each of the next five years, The Washington Post reports. Distributed Monday and reported on by the Post last night, Hegseth’s memo instructed military leaders to fund only what was needed for a “wartime tempo” while cutting “low-impact items” such as DEI programs and “climate change studies.” (The Pentagon’s budget is about $850 billion, so Hegseth is looking to cut roughly $68 billion in year one.) The memo identified specific exemptions to the proposed cuts, including border operations, nuclear weapons and missile defense, and “support agency funding” for the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and Northern Command. European Command and Central Command (the latter covers the Middle East), however, appear to be on the chopping block:

Separately, NBC reports that the Pentagon has presented a list to congressional Republicans of “military generals and flag officers”—most of them associated with Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin—who could be fired this week.

→Some of the administration’s gaudy claims of “waste, fraud, and abuse” may be overstated, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of questionable spending to go around. The Washington Free Beacon’s Thomas Catenacci found two particularly glaring examples in two stories published yesterday and today. In one, he reports a $2 billion grant for a nonprofit called Power Forward Communities, linked to former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Power Forward Communities—which opened in October 2023 and reported only $100 in assets prior to receiving the $2 billion (that’s with a b) grant from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF)—is a project of another group called Rewiring Communities, which employs Abrams as its legal counsel and is a fiscally sponsored project of Windward Fund, one of the spokes of the Arabella Advisors dark-money empire.

To be clear, the full amount of that grant did not go to Rewiring Communities; Power Forward Communities was a partnership between it and other more well-known nonprofits, such as United Way and Habitat for Humanity. But it does indicate how the nonprofit sphere can be a conduit for public money to well-connected insiders, which is the theme of Catenacci’s second story—that Jahi Wise, the Biden EPA official who oversaw the $27 billion GGRF, approved a $5 billion grant to the Coalition for Green Capital—his employer until 2021. After leaving the Biden administration in September 2024, Wise joined George Soros’ Open Society Foundations as a “leadership in government fellow,” where he will “study policies that accelerate the mobilization of public and private capital into climate projects.”

And the rabbit hole may go even deeper. As Fox New’s Elizabeth MacDonald wrote on X, a group called Climate Power Action got an “undisclosed amount” from the GGRF and “then launched a $55M ad campaign for Kamala Harris’s 2024 race.”

Read the stories here: https://freebeacon.com/trump-administration/billions-doge-found-parked-at-bank-earmarked-for-stacey-abrams-backed-green-group/

And here: https://freebeacon.com/energy/activist-slush-fund-biden-epa-official-steered-5b-to-his-former-employer/

→A handful of other DOGE updates:

• Today the Internal Revenue Service is expected to begin laying off about 7,000 probationary employees.

• The National Security Agency has identified 4,000 probationary employees for potential firing.

• The Pentagon is compiling a list of its probationary employees, though we have not yet seen an estimate as to the number, and some who work in critical areas may be retained.

• On the subject of “critical employees,” the Trump administration late last week had to abruptly reinstate hundreds of fired employees from the National Nuclear Security Administration, a subsidiary of the Department of Energy. “I probably moved a little too quickly there,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Scripps News.

• The State Department ordered its outposts worldwide to cancel subscriptions to “non-mission critical” publications, including Politico, The New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, and The Economist.

• DOGE cancelled the Securities and Exchange Commission’s $10 million contract with Westlaw, a subscription-based legal research database owned by Thomson Reuters, apparently because “Reuters” appears in the name of the contract. Which we suppose is good news for LexisNexis, Westlaw’s only competitor.

→Stat of the Day: $149 billion

That’s the dollar amount of “improper payments” flagged by federal agencies in financial year 2024, about 90% of which were overpayments. According to a Thursday report in The Wall Street Journal, the federal government routinely reports at least $100 billion in improper payments every year, with the vast majority of that sum coming from Medicare and Medicaid. About 5%, or $7.2 billion, was “court-confirmed fraud” in 2024, though it seems reasonable to assume there could be fraud not yet confirmed in a court. Still, according to the article, the biggest sources of “improper payments” come from programs jointly administered between the federal government and states that rely on state workers to determine eligibility, such as Medicaid and SNAP, and from “price gouging” by federal contractors.

→Quote of the Day:

Yesterday morning, like I do every morning, I woke up and immediately opened Twitter (a.k.a. X), where the first thing I saw was Elon Musk reacting positively to a post alleging that actor Tom Hanks is a pedophile. Then I saw that Lord Miles—a conservative travel influencer best known for visiting Afghanistan during the Taliban’s reconquista in 2021—has come to believe that another right-wing influencer, this one anonymous, is “not an Anglo Saxon and therefore should be ignored.” When I scrolled on, I saw someone telling the self-described misogynist and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate, whose father was black, that he’s a “mongrel half breed.” Then, my coffee was done!

That’s from an essay in The Free Press by River Page on what’s become of X lately. Page predicts an impending cultural backlash, similar to the backlash against the woke, against all of the far-right influencers now posting tirades against interracial marriage and denouncing journalists as “kikeslave gremlins” (to use one colorful phrase we saw yesterday). We’re not so sure, in part because we suspect the fracturing of the media environment has eliminated the “universal public square” role played by pre-Elon Twitter, enabling extreme subcultures to simply fester in their swamps. That said, yeah, it’s getting pretty bad out there.

Read it here:

The Online Right Is Building a Monster

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Their Time Is Up

The murder of the Bibas children caps off an 18-month catalog of horrors that has told us exactly who our Palestinian neighbors are. Backed by a friend in the White House, Israel must secure its future through strong unilateral action.

by Liel Leibovitz

Grief means little. Rage matters even less. All that we have now are the cold, unfeeling facts: Kfir Bibas, the baby smiling sweetly at us in the photograph, holding his pink elephant, was taken violently from his home, together with his mother Shiri and his four-year-old brother, Ariel. They were held in Gaza and eventually murdered. We may never know the details of their ordeal, but we know plenty about their tormentors. For nearly eighteen months, we’ve been collecting forensic evidence about the specimens who live in Gaza. What do we know about them? The question matters. A lot. In fact, no other does, particularly as Israel and the United States are trying to ascertain how to proceed now that the first round of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas is nearing its end.

What do we know, then?

We know the numbers: A large-scale survey of Gazans, conducted by researchers from Oxford University and published in Foreign Affairs just last week, showed that whereas only 36% of Gazans supported Hamas prior to October 7, 2023, the number spiked to well over a half in March 2024, and began to decline only when Israel successfully eliminated Yahya Sinwar in October of last year. Which should come as no surprise considering the fact that 98% of those surveyed described themselves as religious, and nearly as many said they saw the conflict with Israel in religious, not political terms: The Jews were usurpers who must be banished. How? When asked, 47% said they wanted to see Israel destroyed and replaced with a strict Islamic state governed by Sharia law, and 20% said they would settle merely for the forced removal of all Jews and their transfer to wherever it was their ancestors had lived prior to immigrating to Israel. The moderates, 17% of them, said they would be alright merely with embracing the Palestinian right of return, a kinder, gentler way to end the Jewish state.

And we know the stories: Many of the Israeli hostages who return tell variations of the same tale, of being held captive by ordinary families, abused and tormented not by bearded zealots with guns but by mothers and fathers and daughters and sons. Liri Albag, for example, the brave IDF soldier who was released in January, was enslaved by one such family, which did not allow her to shower for 37 days and, witnessing her growing faint with hunger, ridiculed her and refused to let her eat any of the food she was forced to cook for her captors.

Such gleeful cruelty has no parallel in the civilized world. Sure, war is hell, and combat rarely concludes without a handful of shocking aberrations. A soldier may crack and do the unthinkable. A rocket might miss its mark, snuffing out innocent lives. That is all too regrettable, and all but unavoidable. But that is not what is happening in Gaza. The footage of a dead Jewish baby returning home to Israel for burial compels us to tell the truth: The assertion that most, or even many, Gazans are innocents hijacked by their tyrannical leaders is a polite fiction. There are certainly some somewhere in the strip, the very young and the very frail included, who neither partook in nor condone the atrocities of the past 18 months, but they should no more redeem Gaza’s genocidal enterprise than the hypothetical ten good men of Sodom and Gomorrah could the cities of the plain.

Like Abraham, our shared Patriarch, we, too, struggled to find the righteous among the wicked. We hoped that the Palestinians of Gaza will show something of the courage we had seen in Syria, Tunisia, or Libya and stand up to their maniacal overlords. No protest materialized, and support for the tyrants grew the more adept they proved at slaughtering the Jews. We hoped for a Palestinian Oskar Schindler, one righteous man or woman who would stand up to Hamas as righteous men and women stood up to the far mightier Nazis and say that no cause or ideology justified the brutal murder of an infant. None came forth. We offered large monetary rewards and safe passage to anyone delivering any information about our hostages; hatred spoke louder than self-interest and cash. Israel’s neighbors to the south had all the opportunities anyone could reasonably ask for to resist, repent, recalculate course. And at every turn, they returned to the singular idea that gives them life and meaning: Kill the Jews, all of them, gleefully.

If we didn’t understand all of this before, we ought to now that we are burying two dead children. And the lesson we must learn is simple. It comes down to one word: enough.

Enough with the sophistry about international laws and human rights. The crucibles in which these ideas were forged, raging with the fires of century-old conflicts, have now cooled down and crumbled. To pretend as if we must now take seriously a torrent of treaties long after the framework guaranteeing their efficacy—if such a framework ever existed in earnest—is sheer lunacy. We’ve seen the United Nations. We’ve seen the International Court of Justice. We’ve seen the Red Cross. To take any of these decrepit and callous concubines of evildoers seriously is not an option any morally or intellectually serious person should ever entertain.

Enough also with the insufferable ululations about Jewish morality and its arc which somehow always bends towards having mercy on the monsters who devour our children. As my dear friend and teacher Rabbi Meir Soloveichik noted in a celebrated article more than two decades ago, hate, too, is a Jewish virtue. The very next holiday on the Jewish calendar, in fact, Purim, is a celebration of the time, long ago, when Jews arose and dispensed with 75,000 of their pursuers, realizing that justice meant not only reversing Haman’s evil decree but forcing all those who were only too eager to partake in the slaughter to face the consequences of their actions. Like them, we, too, are fighting millions of little Hamans, murderous marauders who will grow emboldened the more we offer them mercy.

Which brings us back to earth, to the realm of the real, the practical, and the political. President Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza of its inhabitants is, if we’re honest, more merciful than any Gazan deserves, offering the savages who heard Kfir Bibas sob without showing a shred of basic human decency the one thing that precious baby will never have—a chance of a good and peaceful life elsewhere. Nevertheless, we must embrace this proposal, because at its heart is the one true and inescapable sentiment: Israelis can no longer be expected to live in proximity to those who desire nothing more than their death.

Negotiating with some other Palestinian group won’t do: The PLO, the PFLP, et al are merely a different shade of murderous. Nor is there much value to the fantasy that the same patient reeducation that cleansed so many Germans of the Nazi inflammation might work in Gaza, too. Gazans aren’t, as some Pollyannish accounts would have us believe, long-suffering innocents who had the misfortune of living through decades of Hamas indoctrination; they’re faithful adherents of a stern interpretation of a still-young religion who believe there is glory in putting the enemies of God to the sword. We can, and should, respect their fierce heart. We can, and must, insist that their hands be nowhere near our necks.

Sadly, Israel is showing a growing lack of resolve which is no longer possible to ignore or explain away as some clever bit of tactical genius. Is it possible that Bibi Netanyahu is playing a very long game of five-dimensional chess with the world, holding out on the real prize, which is smiting the regime in Iran? Maybe! But meanwhile, closer to home, nothing is done. A few days ago, a very wise friend wrote to share this startling thought: for the past 18 months, we’ve all listened to Israel’s best and brightest, including Netanyahu himself, go on the sort of podcasts beloved by the self-appointed best and brightest of the American Jewish community, saying that if only they had the proper American support, they would’ve waged a very different war against Hamas.

Now, American support is manifest. Now, an American president possessing uncommon moral clarity and candor is advocating for the opening of the gates of hell. And rather than live up to a year of tough talk, Israel equivocates, looking weak, wounded, and confused. Those exploding beepers were a marvel. The killing of Nasrallah was a thing of beauty. But you don’t win wars and secure the peace with a sprinkling of daring commando acts or a dash of excellent air raids. You win wars and secure the peace by making your enemy realize that they had lost, and in the Middle East, as anyone who has ever consulted a history book could tell you, that means only one thing: seizing land.

Israel, then, must annex Judea and Samaria right now, if only to appear as certain of its right to its ancestral homeland as, say, Senator Tom Cotton. It must enthusiastically advocate for Trump’s plan, or some other arrangement that leaves Gaza empty of Gazans. It must take one long look at Kfir Bibas’ coffin and realize precisely what happens when evil is met with too many clever arguments and not enough swift deeds.