March 28, 2024: Anatomy of an ‘Anti-Trans’ Hoax
Soros funds another PFLP-tied charity; Israel must invade Rafah, says Petraeus; Joe Lieberman, 1942-2024
The Big Story
If you still read The New York Times, you may remember the story of Dagny “Nex” Benedict, a nonbinary-identifying teenage girl from Oklahoma who died on Feb. 8, one day after a fight with classmates at her public high school.
From the beginning, there was an absence of any evidence that Benedict had died as a result of the fight—in fact, local police insisted that this was not the case. Nor was there any reason to suspect that her nonbinary identity had anything to do with her death, aside from vague reports that Benedict, like many awkward teenagers, had been “picked on” in school. Yet within a few weeks of her death, the incident became a cause célèbre among professional LGBT activists, Democratic politicians, and the national press, who asserted or implied that Benedict had been bullied or “killed” as a result of GOP-backed “anti-trans” policies, as well as by the rhetoric of figures such as Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the influential Libs of TikTok X account.
On Feb. 21, for instance, the president of LGBT nonprofit GLAAD issued a statement describing Benedict’s death as a “shocking attack,” connecting it to “book bans” and “laws that target LGBT youth” and demanding that “leaders and extremists” be “held responsible for failing to keep Nex safe.” That same day, an all-star team of leading Democrats chimed in on X to condemn the “killing”:
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: “Every young person deserves to feel safe and supported at school. Our hearts are with Nex Benedict’s family, their friends, and their entire school community in the wake of this horrific tragedy.”
House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi: “Nex Benedict’s death from a brutal assault in their high school bathroom is outrageous and heartbreaking. The anti-trans fervor fueled by extreme Republicans across the country is having deadly consequences for our children. We must stand up against anti-trans hate.”
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “The killing of Nex Benedict is gut-wrenching and underscores the danger of extremists who are dehumanizing kids with anti-trans hate in Oklahoma and across the country. Every student should feel safe at school and supported for who they are. Nex deserves justice.”
Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey: “Nex Benedict should still have their entire life ahead of them. The loss of this 16-year-old non-binary, native student is heartbreaking and infuriating. We must do better. We must pass the Transgender Bill of Rights, confront hatred and bigotry, and protect trans kids.”
Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush: “Anti-trans rhetoric leads to anti-trans violence. My heart is with the loved ones of Nex Benedict, a non-binary Indigenous teenager who died after being brutally beaten at their high school. We must continue to legislate to end bigotry & hate in all its forms.”
The New York Times ran at least seven stories on Benedict’s death between Feb. 21 and March 1. Two of those stories, including one headlined “Anti-Trans Policies Draw Scrutiny After 16-Year-Old’s Death in Oklahoma,” connected Benedict’s death to state laws banning gender-transition treatments for minors and to the appointment of Chaya Raichick to an Oklahoma state education agency; they also scrutinized the decision of local police not to launch a criminal or hate-crime investigation into the students who fought with Benedict. A Feb. 29 article in The Learning Network, an NYT vertical dedicated to providing classroom resources for teachers, prompted high-school students to share their feelings about Benedict’s death with questions such as “Do you think that when leaders or influential figures publicly dehumanize or demonize people in marginalized groups, it can inspire others to do the same?”
Then the federal government got involved. On March 1, in response to a complaint from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the U.S. Department of Education opened a federal investigation into whether Benedict’s high school had violated Title IX by failing to respond to “alleged harassment.” On March 13, the Oklahoma medical examiner released the results of Benedict’s autopsy, which showed that she had died by suicide from an intentional overdose of Benadryl—not as a result of a “brutal assault” (Pelosi) or “killing” (Warren) at the hands of her classmates. The summary of the autopsy also noted that handwritten notes left by the teenager were “suggestive of self-harm” but did not reference the fight or other issues at school. But this new information merely prompted a minor update to the narrative. The next day, Joe Biden issued an official White House statement on Benedict’s death, writing:
Nonbinary and transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know. But nobody should have to be brave just to be themselves. In memory of Nex, we must all recommit to our work to end discrimination and address the suicide crisis impacting too many nonbinary and transgender children.
The idea that “transphobic” attitudes lead to suicide in “nonbinary and transgender children,” of course, is one of the central myths behind the scientifically unsupported practice of “gender-affirming care,” which counsels irreversible hormonal and surgical interventions for minors who claim gender identities at variance with their biological sex. And, indeed, in a speech at an HRC dinner in Los Angeles this past Saturday, Jill Biden doubled down on this same message. “Laws and attitudes can lead to devastating consequences—harm that can’t be undone, that leaves parents torn by grief,” the First Lady said. “Parents and grandparents like Sue Benedict—may Nex rest in peace—and the countless others who have lost LGBTQ children to suicide, bullying, and hate.”
Finally, yesterday, the Oklahoma medical examiner released Benedict’s full autopsy report. In addition to affirming Benedict’s cause of death, the autopsy also noted that she suffered from “bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, self-harm (cutting), chronic tobacco abuse and chronic marijuana abuse.”
The real kicker, however, was reported by Chad Felix Greene of RedState.com. According to court records, Benedict had good reason to be depressed—but that reason had nothing to do with “laws and attitudes.” Benedict had been repeatedly sexually abused by her biological father between the ages of 9 and 11. We won’t go into the details, but they are horrific, and her father, James Everette Hughes, was prosecuted in Arkansas for rape of a minor under 14 and pled guilty to felony sexual assault as part of a plea deal, under which he received a sentence of five years in prison (he was released in January, though it is unclear if Benedict knew). Nex, whose birth name was Dagny Hughes, was later adopted by her grandmother, Sue Benedict, and relocated from Arkansas to Oklahoma to attempt to begin a new life. Green writes:
She was a survivor who endured extreme trauma from someone she was supposed to be able to trust. Her life was upended, and she understandably struggled greatly. Bullying from other students may have impacted her more deeply than she let on, but from the evidence she provided, her pain was much, much more profound.
In other words, not only was Benedict’s story not a tale of transphobic “hate” and “bullying” leading to suicide, it was something like the opposite: an example of how for troubled teenagers, “gender identity” can be a mask for much deeper forms of psychological trauma that cannot be addressed through hormones, surgical interventions, or using the “right” bathroom.
As Wesley Yang noted on X in response to the release of the autopsy:
IN THE BACK PAGES: Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls explains that Israel is defending not only itself, but the values of a civilization under siege
The Rest
→Charities connected with George Soros have pumped more than $1 million into a Gazan human-rights center with “deep ties to Palestinian terrorists,” according to a report by Gabe Kaminsky in the Washington Examiner. Since 2012, the Soros-backed Open Society Institute and the Foundation to Promote Open Society have funded the Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. In addition to being a “well-funded operation” that lobbies the United Nations to prosecute Israeli officials for “war crimes” at the International Criminal Court, however, Al Mezan appears to be deeply connected with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a “Marxist-Leninist” U.S.-designated terror group that has cooperated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in attacks on Israelis. Al Mezan’s chairman, for instance, met with the leader of the PFLP in Cairo in 2015 and referred to him as “comrade,” posted social media photos of himself attending memorial services for PFLP leaders, and has hosted PFLP officials through his role as a trustee of Gaza’s Al-Aqsa University. Al Mezan’s board members include one former PFLP member and one former director of the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Legislative Council, who has been referred to as a “Hamas leader” in Arabic-language media. Al Mezan has also hosted several events featuring leaders from the PFLP, Hamas, and PIJ.
Al Mezan has also received funding from the European Union and the governments of Sweden and Norway.
Read the story here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign-policy/2939032/george-soros-pledged-1-million-to-hamas-propaganda-organization-linked-to-terrorism/
→On Thursday, the Jewish Democratic Council of America endorsed primary challengers to “Squad” members Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO)—the first time the group has ever endorsed challengers to Democratic incumbents, Jewish Insider reports. Bowman and Bush have been strident and often delusional critics of Israel since Oct. 7—Bush, for instance, has blamed homelessness in St. Louis on public money going to “militarized policing” and Israeli “apartheid”—but both are also mired in other scandals. Bowman pled guilty to a misdemeanor for pulling a fire alarm in a House office building, while Bush is under criminal investigation for misusing federal funds to pay for private security. The guards she hired include her husband and a “close friend,” Nathaniel Davis III, who claims to be a 109-trillion-year-old intergalactic master of psychic self-defense with the powers to levitate and summon tornadoes with his mind, and who has also accused the Rothschilds of engineering COVID-19 to wipe out “99 percent” of humanity. A spokesman for the JDCA said the group was focusing on primary races that were “competitive.”
→In meetings with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Monday and Tuesday, U.S. officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, focused not on how to prevent an IDF invasion of Rafah, but on how to protect civilians, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. This focus on the logistics of the operation marks a major rhetorical climbdown from last week, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a Rafah operation would risk “further isolating” Israel and damage its long-term security. The new focus also may reflect a U.S. understanding that it needs to “find ways to work with Israel on its Rafah strategy” lest the Israelis stop listening to the administration altogether, as the WSJ puts it. But for now, at least, the concessions may be more rhetorical than real. Israel has suggested that it could begin an operation after the end of Ramadan in April, but it has yet to present Washington with a concrete plan. And the American objective does not appear to have changed. “Our goal,” one U.S. official told the WSJ, “is to help Israel find an alternative to a full-scale and perhaps premature military operation.”
→On the off chance you’d like the perspective of an American military man no longer beholden to Team Obama-Biden: Former U.S. Army Gen. and CIA Director David Petraeus told Britain’s Sky News on Wednesday that Israel must go into Rafah and destroy Hamas, that it must maintain security control of Gaza “for the long haul,” and that “initially, there’s no alternative to the Israel Defense Forces doing that.” Petraeus also emphasized that “you can’t deal with [Hamas] just with targeted raids” and that “this not a counter-terrorism campaign”—citing the same experience in Iraq that Biden officials have repeatedly cited to push the Israelis toward targeted raids and a counter-terrorism campaign. Petraeus was emphatic, however, that the Israelis cannot simply fence the Palestinians off indefinitely and instead must convince them that “we are going to make life better for you by getting Hamas out of your midst.”
→Israel has agreed to provide security for the United States’ humanitarian pier in Gaza, according to a Tuesday report in Politico, citing U.S. officials. “Under the plans being discussed, which have not yet been finalized, the Israel Defense Forces would establish a ‘security bubble’ to protect the U.S. personnel building the pier,” according to the report, and would also be responsible for “physically securing the pier to the beach.” As a reminder of how stupid this whole thing is, the pier is only being built in the first place because the Biden administration freaked out over false Hamas-sourced reports of an IDF massacre at an aid convoy in Gaza in late February, which came after the IDF had fired warning shots to disperse a crowd as part of its obligation to provide security to truck drivers who had been hired to deliver aid into Gaza. In other words, the United States is now asking Israel to provide security for a humanitarian aid project intended as a symbolic middle finger to Israel over its previous attempts to provide security for humanitarian aid projects.
→White House officials have discussed a proposal for the Pentagon to “help fund either a multinational force or a Palestinian peacekeeping team” to stabilize postwar Gaza, Politico reported on Thursday. Very few details were included in the article, but it does note that a Palestinian force “could include some of the nearly 20,000 security personnel backed by the Palestinian Authority since Hamas took control of the enclave in the mid-2000s.”
→The NYPD has arrested a man for sucker-punching a TikTok star—part of a larger wave of similar sucker-punch attacks in downtown Manhattan—and the suspect is … drum roll, please ... a failed GOP mayoral candidate, Black Trump supporter, and rapper who claims to be the great-great-great grandson of Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey. Skiboky Stora, 40, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with assault for a Monday attack on Halley Kate, an influencer with more than 1 million followers on TikTok, in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Stora unsuccessfully ran for a city council seat last year on a Freedom Party ticket and received 264 votes in the 2022 mayoral election, running with the Out Lawbreaker Party after being “withdrawn or disqualified” from the Republican ticket. His 2022 campaign website notes that “defunding the police is a bad policy” (true) and identifies Stora as “a member of the Movement of Freedom aka The Donald Trump Movement.” The truth is stranger than fiction.
→On Thursday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced the rollout of “electromagnetic weapons detecting systems”—in essence, metal-detecting body scanners—in New York subway stations. The proximate cause of the move is a high-profile, fatal shooting incident on a Brooklyn subway car on March 15, but Adams’ intrusive bit of security theater is unlikely to do much about the numerous violent subway attacks that don’t involve guns, including a fatal shoving incident in Harlem earlier this week. Felony assaults on the subway rose 53% from 2019 to 2023, according to NYPD data, with many of those assaults coming from a small number of repeat offenders who cannot be incarcerated due to “criminal justice reform” measures passed by the far-left city council. NYPD’ Chief of Transit Michael Kemper posted on X last week that 124 individuals were arrested on the subway five or more times in 2023, and that those 124 had been arrested more than 7,500 times in their lifetimes, for an average of more than 60 lifetime arrests each.
→Joseph Lieberman, the four-term Connecticut senator and first Jewish American on a major-party presidential ticket, died Wednesday in Manhattan from complications from a fall. He was 82. A native of Stamford, Connecticut, and a Yale-educated lawyer (back when that meant something), Lieberman was a principled centrist who often bucked his colleagues in the Democratic Party. He was the first Democrat to condemn Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky and became a prominent supporter of the Iraq War, which caused him to lose the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Senate primary—only to run and win reelection as an Independent. As Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, Lieberman came within a hair’s breadth of the vice presidency, only to be thwarted when the Supreme Court halted a Florida ballot recount in Bush v. Gore.
Lieberman was also a lifelong supporter of Israel. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal published a note that Lieberman had co-authored with Alan Dershowitz immediately prior to his death, which the pair had intended to circulate among pro-Israel Democrats and send to the White House as an open letter. It read in part:
We are here to say that you can no longer simply count on our vote just because Jews traditionally have voted Democratic. We are here to say you must earn our vote. We want to continue to support Democratic candidates, but you need to know that if you abandon Israel in order to garner the support of anti-Israel extremists within the Democratic Party, it will be difficult for us to support Democrats who are on the ballot this November. Pro-Israel voters have alternatives to simply staying home. None of us can or will vote for any candidate who supports cutting military support for Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas.
Sen. Lieberman was also a frequent subject of Tablet coverage, especially in our early days, and was a guest on the May 3, 2018, episode of Unorthodox.
View our Lieberman-related stories here: https://www.tabletmag.com/tags/joe-lieberman
And listen to the man himself here: https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/unorthodox/unorthodox-podcast-episode-134-senator-joe-lieberman-skyler-inman
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Israel on the Front Lines
The former prime minister of France explains that Israel fights in Gaza not only to defend itself, but to protect the values and security of a civilization under siege by an army of cowards and negationists
By Manuel Valls.
What follows is the lightly edited text of a speech delivered by former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls in Paris on March 19, 2024. Translated from the French by Matthew Fishbane.
I am convinced that the most essential thing today is the confrontation, dull but obvious, between liberal democracy and several forms of populism and totalitarianism that deeply challenge who we are. They attack our universal values, those of 1789 of course, our common heritage, democracy, respect for human beings and otherness, respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers, equality between women and men, the freedom of conscience, to believe or not to believe, to think, to write and caricature, culture.
There are many front lines. These are not easily summed up as a confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, or between good and evil. I don’t like that caricatural reading.
Populism is first our internal enemy, attacking ourselves, our democratic systems. As in the 1930s, it is originally Western. Can you imagine a world with Trump on one side and on the other Le Pen? It’s not an impossible scenario.
The first front line is in Ukraine, where our future is in play. We must do everything we can to support the brave Ukrainian people, everything to ensure that Russia doesn’t win, everything we can so that international law and justice win.
Another front line is the war brought by Islamism, shaped by the hatred of Jews. Twelve years ago, our country was hit at Montauban and Toulouse. Twelve years ago, to the day, we stood in the courtyard of the Ozar Hatorah school, martyred by an Islamist terrorist.
Europe is more than ever the target of jihadism and Islamism. Their strategy is long term, structured first on the European countries with large Muslim communities. Their goal is to attack us not just from without, but especially from within, to hit us at our heart to sow terror and division.
France has been in the crosshairs for many years, in its democratic, secular, Christian and Jewish dimensions, because we are the country of the Enlightenment and our values are universal. Our schools and our courageous teachers are hit. The press too. Charlie Hebdo and its editorial team will forever embody liberty and the France of Voltaire and Rabelais.
We have forgotten the long view and we don’t think about it between each attack. Sadly, we will be hit again. I told some young high schoolers the day after those terrible attacks in January 2015: “You are a generation that will live with terrorism.” It’s not nice to say nor to hear. But it is necessary to continually remind the French that this battle will be long and arduous.
We therefore need all of society to be mobilized, everywhere.
This war is fed by political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood. We must understand the link between jihadists and Islamism that ideologically validates ruptures with society. Let us be clear: Here at home, we have thousands of radicalized people who represent a major threat.
We must first count on our security forces and our armies, on the patient work of our intelligence services and of the justice system.
But we must also wage an ideological, intellectual, and cultural war against Islamism. We must understand that for the last 40 years Islam and Muslims have been caught in the convulsions of our contemporary world: the Iranian revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the wars in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabian and Qatari support of fundamentalist Islam, Khomeini’s fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie, the civil war in Algeria that caused 150,000 deaths in the ’90s, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 … and in Europe.
The greatest challenge is within Islam itself: We must prevent the collusion of fundamentalist Islam and moderate Islam. European Muslims are the Islamists’ objective, they want to separate them from the rest of the citizenry, they hope there will be retaliations and attacks against mosques so that a climate of civil war can be created. Which is why they must be protected, but also reminded of their own responsibilities. All Muslims must rise up against this Islamism. I’m particularly troubled when I read that 57% of young Muslims consider Shariah more important than the republic’s law. If we in Europe are not capable of building an enlightened Islam, through the promotion of Muslim intellectuals who share our values, through interpretation of the Quran, through controls on imams, with a de facto break with the Islam of the native countries, then the worst is possible. Which is to say, confrontation.
The path along the ridge is narrow. We are democracies, states with rule of law, and also societies confronted with unprecedented crises of confidence. It’s a difficult time. Defending democracy, our civilization, secularized, tolerant societies, with our Judeo-Christian heritage, and integrating the Islam of millions of citizens who will remain here, the great majority of whom—it should be remembered—reject Islamism: This is a considerable, crucial task.
But what is the connection with Israel?
It’s the same front line.
Oh, obviously, with all the differences and nuances.
But Israel, the only democracy in the region, an open society, where 2 million Israeli Arabs live with the same rights as the rest of the population, is attacked by the Islamists of Hamas.
I want to say a few personal words.
I’ve visited Israel regularly for more than 40 years now.
I’ve forgotten nothing of my encounters with young laborers in the early ’80s, of my carefree travels in the West Bank, of my stays at a kibbutz, of the later sistering of the town of Évry with the camp in Khan Yunis in the south of Gaza (before Hamas took power there).
I mourned Yitzhak Rabin, the man of the Oslo Accords who had raised so many hopes, assassinated by a Jewish fanatic. I’ll always remember my last discussion in 2015 with Shimon Peres, who still believed in peace and who imagined what might come of the Abraham Accords.
I love this country, its people, its dynamism, its resilience, its force, its army, the IDF, courageous, young, and popular … but I also can’t ignore its weaknesses and fractures.
“I love this people-world, stuck on a minuscule band of earth that ended up being conceded to it, now three-quarters of a century ago, by the West and a world still dripping with the all the Jewish blood spilled over the centuries, and I love the miracle of endurance and intelligence, of lucidity and goodness: even as, like on the first day, exactly like that first day, it hears its neighbors howling death, it remains, for the most part, loyal to its founding principles and ready for peace the day that the others also are.”
These words are not my own; you can find them in the wonderful work of Bernard-Henri Lévy. So strong, so right, so personal.
I make them mine.
I don’t know how many times I’ve been to Israel.
But since Oct. 7, everything has changed.
I felt it deep down, on the spot, next to the representatives whom I salute and who were with us. A few days after Oct. 7, we dove into the country’s disarray and incomprehension, the horror at the perpetrated acts, the smell of death, the pain, the dignity and tears of families close to the victims and hostages—those French and all the others too—the reaction of the IDF. We did not return unscathed …
But we also immediately understood and anticipated the implacable mechanics of the “yes, but,” this new negationism, which was about to be put into place to erase the crime and turn the reaction of the attacked into the cause of all evil.
Worse still, the victim, basically, deserved it! Ah, if shame had a face …
For, as I understand it listening to a lot of commentary since Oct. 7, it’s really that all the misfortune in the world can be blamed on the State of Israel. And, as we’ve heard on television, the Israelis massacred at a rave party, did they not have any consciousness of the “indecency” of their celebrations—given that just a few hundred meters away as the crow flies, the Palestinians were living in an “open-air prison”?
On Oct. 7, pregnant women were disemboweled. It’s unfathomable, we condemn it, but in the long view, hasn’t the politics of “colonization” sharpened the hatred of the oppressed?
Infants were decapitated. It’s barbaric, for certain, but the Gaza blockade, in the long view, has put an entire generation of youths in a cage.
Grandmothers were butchered, their corpses stomped on. It’s horrible, but wasn’t it Netanyahu himself, in the long view, who made Hamas grow?
Israel’s misfortunes, deep down, she caused them herself.
We demand from Israel and its “hateful government” temperance, measured action, restraint. To be exemplary, perhaps? Either way, we demand of the country, which can’t wait for our opinion, a “targeted and proportional” response. Only that way, would it be legitimate.
Yes, that’s what we are hearing in France, that’s what our diplomats are saying, lacking all imagination, so, so cowardly, yes, like other chancelleries—and that’s to say nothing of a totally discredited United Nations—so far removed from the realities on the ground.
We demand a permanent cease-fire … But that would be a victory for Hamas!
What are these people thinking?
In the noise and fracas of international reprobation, I’m still waiting for one thing, which I haven’t yet heard: Has anyone at all thought to ask Hamas to prove its temperance and to contain its own violence?
Who is demanding of Hamas to free its hostages, spoils of an ignoble bargain, to lay down its arms, to demand of its leaders to surrender or go away.
And yet, if these conditions were met, the war would be over!
The truth is that without Hamas—an Islamist organization founded by the Muslim Brotherhood—Israel would not be in a permanent state of war to defend itself and its citizens in the face of uninterrupted rocket attacks sent over Israeli territory. Only Israel’s technological power keeps it from continually crying over new dead.
Without Hamas, there would not have been an Oct. 7, there would be no hostages, no war.
That’s what our diplomatic corps should be defending, instead of coming out with the same tired language of decades past.
We all want to end the war and its procession of violence, death, suffering, with, first of all, Israelis mourning their sons and daughters sent into combat and the Gazans transformed into human shields by Hamas. All lives are worth the same. But intentions are not.
So let us say things clearly:
I have no sympathy for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its ultra-right-wing ministers, and not much more for a large part of the Israeli population that has watched its country slip into a political impasse for too long. At the end of this war, Israelis will demand explanations, they alone will choose, with sovereignty, to turn the page on this suffering. It’s up to them to decide—not us. For Israelis form a lively, beautiful democracy.
But they will have to take on other challenges that we cannot ignore, those posed by Hezbollah and of course Iran. And here too, we are fully implicated.
We know that peace will arrive through the elimination of Hamas’ terrorist apparatus. It’s the first condition for reestablishing a Palestinian Authority worthy of its name, in Gaza and the West Bank, provided the PA changes, that its corrupt and discredited leaders are replaced. In partnership with Israel, which will demand absolute security on its borders, and with the support of the international community and countries in the region, a political solution must be found for the Palestinian people, who have a right to self-determination.
It will take time … a long time. It won’t be easy, as you know. And we’ll have to return to the beautiful reflection that Jean-Michel Blanquer gave us.
The attacks of Oct. 7 were the worst in Israel’s history. The barbarity manifested and the inhumanity of the acts that day gave us all a lesson on the enemy that the Israelis must fight.
Our own enemies are not that different. In Toulouse, Nice, Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, or in Paris. See the link between the Bataclan and the rave in the Negev.
So obvious.
Which is why we must defend Israel’s right to defend itself.
It’s a country’s duty to respond as a democratic state that protects its citizens. France had to make this choice the day after the attacks of November 2015.
And while Israel fights, like the Ukrainians, also for us, in defense of our values, our support must be impeccable.
All we have to do is stand together against obscurantism.
We must rise up against the hatred of Jews that has surged in our compatriots since the start of this conflict with a terrorist group.
For too long, we have been lonely, too few, in denouncing the hatred of Jews against a background of rising Islamism and abject complicity from a part of the political left, along with cowards of all stripes.
The Jews of France knew the torment of Ilan Halimi. They saw the denial of justice that Sarah Halimi endured, after Ilan’s death.
The killings in Toulouse, those in the Hypercacher in Vincennes, the death, in 2018, of Mireille Knoll, a Shoah survivor, stabbed at home, all revealed that the France of human rights and the Dreyfus affair had become a country where one could die simply for being Jewish.
And since Oct. 7, the anxiety and incomprehension are back. Fear, too, in the form of a kippah no longer worn in public, a name erased from a mailbox, a mezuzah taken down. Now, in Paris’ Science Po university, a student is denied entry to a meeting because she is Jewish, sorry: a Zionist!!!
Like the Jewish women, thrown out of the protests of March 8, because they wanted to recall the incomparable femicides of Oct. 7.
It’s unbearable. That’s not France. It’s time to revolt! And to make the republic stand!
So, dear Bernard-Henri Lévy, you write of the solitude of Israel: Are Jews alone? Yes, you are right: “There is no land, on this planet, that is a haven for Jews, that’s what Oct. 7 made clear.”
To not understand that is to not understand anything about what we are living through, or what the Israelis feel, what the Jewish world feels.
It is our imperative duty to respect without fail the history of Jews in our country, and their past suffering.
I will not tire of repeating:
Without France’s Jews, France is no longer France.
That duty ties us, through our fraternal bond, to Israel.
Tonight, I want to say to the Israeli people, to my Jewish compatriots, that thanks to this magnificent assembly, to our engagement, and mine, as with a majority of French people, you are not alone!
Over there, our future, our destiny is also in play.
Oct. 7 reveals the drift on one part of the left—the famous “irreconcilable” left—of the ravages of Islamo-leftism, of wokism in our universities, of relativism, of social media, of conspiratorial theories that converge in their hate of universal values and therefore of Jews.
Yes, it’s all the same front line.
To be a patriot and republican is to understand that.
Oct. 7 is therefore a revealing event that forces us into a startling realization.
Only republicanism and an uncompromising defense of our universal values, of secularism, of our schools, our language, the uniqueness of France will make it possible.
It’s another story?
No, it’s the same one.
And we will meet again to speak of it, and act together.
So, let us take the offensive!
That’s the pact that we seal this beautiful night!
Thank you.
Senator Lieberman of blessed memory was the last of the Scoop Jackson Democrats
Trump went to the wake for a NYC cop killed in the line of duty and Clinton Obama and Biden came to NYC to raise funds What a stark contrast in values