COMMENTARY / OPINION
Short thoughts as the live hostages are now home in Israel. Avi Abelow
It is miraculous to see hostages come home, and for that I am thankful.
Netanyahu defied all odds in succeeding in getting all the live hostages out of captivity without succumbing to the dangerous pressure of the opposition, the hostage protest movement and even the top echelon of the security/intelligence establishment.
Still, it’s a horrible deal.
Tragic that it came at the cost of releasing hundreds of despicable and dangerous terrorists, all who should have been given the death penalty.
This is a repeat of the disastrous Shalit deal. I remember being adamantly against it, knowing it was a mistake. Yet I still sat my young children in front of the TV to witness his return from Hamas captivity. It felt historic… but deep down, I knew the price was too high.
Not PC to say it, but true: the victims of Oct. 7 paid the price for that deal. Now we’re repeating the same mistake, again 😞
Heartbroken for the families of terror victims, whose murderers are going free in this deal.
Heartbroken for the IDF soldiers who fought and were killed or injured, only to be told the war is over while it definitely is not, as Hamas still rules Gaza.
And no, business deals and investing money into Arab Muslim countries that support jihad against Israel and the West, won’t erase 1,400 + years of jihadist ideology to subjugate all infidels and take over the world.
I know Trump and Netanyahu have big plans to change the Middle East, but so long as our enemies are not called out for what they are, Islamonaz*is, and not treated as such, then we will continue to have challenging times ahead.
Still, God has a plan. We’re in the days of redemption. The light is coming. But this war didn’t remove nearly enough evil as we had hoped.
Strengthen your faith. Despite the mistakes of our leaders, the Lion of Zion has been awaked. We are on the path to fulfilling our destiny as the Jewish people in our ancestral homeland.
And help me pressure for the death penalty to finally be instituted in Israel so no horrific deals like this can even happen again.
Am Yisrael Chai!!!
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Diplomacy with a Baseball Bat by Lawrence Kadish
October 13, 2025
The only people who should be surprised that U.S. President Donald Trump was able to broker a peace deal in Gaza are the ones who continue to underestimate this man.
The fact is, his language is far more deliberate and far more calculating than what often appears to be “top of the mind” or extemporaneous. So when he told Hamas that if they did not come to the peace table, he would give Israel a free hand to “finish the job,” the remaining leaders of that terrorist organization had to consider that Trump was telling them the game was up.
It was diplomacy with a baseball bat. In this world, filled with despots, dictators and destructive leaders, as you will find in Iran, this tactic may be the only one that brings desired results.
Here is another lesson being learned by world leaders.
If you elect a terrorist organization to be your government, as the Palestinians in Gaza did by electing Hamas, and your elected government then conducts atrocities by raping Israeli women, slaughtering children, murdering 1,200 people, and kidnapping 251 others as hostages, Israel will descend on you with a righteous might that destroys your world.
Hamas sent thousands of their murderers across the border with the specific intent of upending the rapprochement beginning to take place between Israel and the Arab world. What they did not count on was an Israeli response that recognized this attack for what it was – war – and war is ugly and violent. Those Hamas voters who danced in the streets of Gaza during and after the October 7th attack discovered that their elected government had just committed suicide.
Those campus protests by Hamas collaborators in the US and the West? The chants of “by any means necessary”? The diplomatic recognition of a “Palestinian State” by some nations? One supposes they would have preferred an Israeli response of conducting mass funerals and collective grieving. Sorry, guys. You must be thinking of some other ethnicity.
Embedded in the DNA of every Jew is the recognition that they are – essentially – on their own. As Nazi Germany launched its machinery for the Holocaust, contemporary media reports and agents on the ground were quite clear about what was taking place. Nations were either studiously indifferent or else clasped their hands in feigned anguish… “Oh the humanity…” as the gas chambers and dedicated death squads worked overtime.
Now the world is on notice. Gaza will serve as a reminder that if anyone seeks to defile or destroy the people of Israel, the response will be unrelenting. They will find you wherever you are and inflict on you and your land pain of Biblical proportions, the same as you had been planning to inflict on them.
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
The EU Is Enabling Religious Persecution in Pakistan by Uzay Bulut
October 13, 2025
- Pakistan has for years been seriously repressing its minorities, political dissidents, human right advocates and journalists – even transnationally. Nevertheless, Pakistan continues to enjoy the benefits of the European Union’s special incentive arrangement under its Generalized System of Preferences (GSP+).
- Journalists in Pakistan (and even the family members of exiled journalists) are subject to enforced disappearances. Journalist Asif Karim Khehtran and the brothers of U.S.-based exiled Pakistani journalist Ahmad Noorani were abducted in March 2025 and remain missing.
- A 2025 report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom documented that more than 700 individuals in 2025 were imprisoned on charges of “blasphemy.” This figure represented a 300% increase from the previous year.
- These acts are not isolated incidents but part of a broader campaign of religious “cleansing,” driven by radical Islamist groups such as the TLP and facilitated by a legal system that criminalizes Ahmadi identity.
- Pakistan’s fierce blasphemy laws continue to target religious minorities. The HRCP report documents that increasingly, minority individuals accused of blasphemy are lynched by mobs or murdered while seeking police protection…. The rise in hate speech, threats against judicial figures, and the politicization of bar associations only propel a dangerous tilt toward Islamic radicalism within state institutions.
- The police appear more interested in appeasing local Islamic strongmen and keeping things calm than in implementing the law and protecting minorities.
- The European Union should stand for the principles and ideals on which its Generalized System of Preferences was based. At present, it is simply furthering intolerable behavior and embarrassing itself.
Pakistan has for years been seriously repressing its minorities, political dissidents, human right advocates and journalists. Nevertheless, Pakistan continues to enjoy the benefits of the European Union’s special incentive arrangement under its Generalized System of Preferences. Pictured: The EU’s then High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Federica Mogherini and Pakistan’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs Shah Mehmood Qureshi, give a press conference after signing the EU-Pakistan Strategic Engagement Plan in Brussels, on June 25, 2019. (Photo by Aris Oikonomou/AFP via Getty Images)
Pakistan is engulfed in a deepening crisis of religious intolerance and systemic persecution. This year has witnessed a disturbing surge of violence, discrimination and institutional complicity. Christian, Ahmadiyya and Hindu communities have particularly been targeted.
Despite repeated calls for reform and international condemnation, Pakistan’s failure to protect its most vulnerable citizens has left a trail of shattered lives, desecrated places of worship, and a society increasingly fractured by hate.
Pakistan has for years been seriously repressing its minorities, political dissidents, human right advocates and journalists – even transnationally. Nevertheless, Pakistan continues to enjoy the benefits of the European Union’s special incentive arrangement under its Generalized System of Preferences (GSP+).
The contradiction was highlighted once again at the United Nations.
As a part of the ongoing 60th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the international NGO CAP Freedom of Conscience collaborated with the news outlet EU Today through a side event on October 1. This event called upon the EU to review Pakistan’s GSP+ status in light of its long-term state-sanctioned human rights violations.
A documentary on the subject, which included statements from multiple Members of European Parliament, was also screened at the event. The organizers were evidently hoping to generate awareness about Pakistan’s ongoing human rights crisis. As a result of the UNHRC’s session, several EU lawmakers and European Commission members were in attendance.
Earlier, on September 30, Baloch human rights defender Joshua George Bowes had raised urgent concerns about Pakistan’s failure to uphold its international human rights obligations while continuing to benefit from the EU’s GSP+ trade status.
Citing the International Federation of Journalists’ South Asia Press Freedom Report 2024–25, Bowes highlighted that Pakistani journalists faced 34 serious press freedom violations. Those included seven targeted killings and eight non-fatal attacks, placing Pakistan at 158th on the World Press Freedom Index.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, between 1992 and 2025, at least 68 journalists were murdered in Pakistan. One recent example is the murder of Imtiaz Mir, a journalist who was shot to death in Karachi last month. Mir, an anchorperson for TV channel Metro 1 News, was heading home in a car driven by his older brother when six suspects riding two motorcycles fired on their vehicle.
On October 2, police in Islamabad stormed the National Press Club. attacking several journalists. Footage shared on social media and by press outlets showed police manhandling, pushing and shoving journalists inside the club.
Violent attacks are part of the wider siege that Pakistani journalists are under. Journalists across Pakistan are increasingly facing crackdowns, enforced disappearances, travel bans, frozen bank accounts, job dismissals, and exile for challenging the country’s entrenched power structures. Journalist and television anchor Samina Pasha, for instance, said her bank account was frozen on the orders of Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA). She called it part of an escalating effort to silence independent journalists.
Journalists in Pakistan (and even the family members of exiled journalists) are subject to enforced disappearances. Journalist Asif Karim Khehtran and the brothers of U.S.-based exiled Pakistani journalist Ahmad Noorani were abducted in March 2025 and remain missing.
Journalists’ YouTube channels are also being targeted on a massive scale. On July 8, at the request of the NCCIA, an Islamabad court ordered 27 YouTube channels to be blocked under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, accusing them of spreading “anti-Pakistan” content.
Bowes also drew attention to a 2025 report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which documented that more than 700 individuals in 2025 were imprisoned on charges of “blasphemy.” This figure represented a 300% increase from the previous year.
He further referenced human rights monitoring by the Baloch National Movement’s human rights department, Paank, which documented 785 enforced disappearances and 121 extrajudicial killings in the first half of 2025 alone. Paank made a direct appeal to the European Council:
“The European Union is Pakistan’s largest trading partner. Continued trade privileges under GSP+ must be linked to real human rights progress, not empty promises.”
Similarly, the Pashtun National Jirga reported last month that more than 4,000 Pashtuns are missing.
The brutal murder of Laeeq Cheema on April 18 stands as a grim symbol of this crisis. Cheema was a 47-year-old member of Pakistan’s Ahmadiyya community who was beaten to death by a Sunni Muslim mob outside an Ahmadi place of worship in Karachi’s Saddar neighborhood. The crowd, reportedly composed of supporters of the Islamist Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), stormed the narrow streets. They shouted anti-Ahmadi slogans and accused the community of violating Pakistan’s vicious anti-Ahmadi laws. Despite police intervention, the mob swelled to more than 600 people. Cheema’s death is simply yet another entry in the long ledger of violence against Pakistan’s Ahmadi religious minority.
In another attack, Dr. Sheikh Mahmood, a prominent Ahmadi gastroenterologist and hepatologist, was shot dead in Sargodha, Punjab on May 16, Christian Solidarity Worldwide reported. According to initial reports, Mahmood, a highly respected doctor, arrived at Fatima Hospital at around 2.30pm to attend to his patients, as was his routine. While walking through the hospital corridor, an unidentified man who had been lying in wait shot him from behind, killing him. The murderer, openly brandishing a pistol, fled the scene.
The Ahmadiyya community (which numbers around 500,000 in Pakistan and nearly 10 million globally) has long been subjected to systemic discrimination. Though Ahmadis consider themselves Muslim and share nearly identical beliefs with mainstream Islam, a 1974 amendment to Pakistan’s constitution nevertheless declares them non-Muslims. A 1984 ordinance criminalized many of their religious practices.
This legal framework only emboldened extremist groups and legitimized persecution. The Ahmadis live in fear, often hiding their identities, avoiding public worship, and facing desecration of their graves and places of worship. On May 10, at least 90 Ahmadi Muslim gravestones were desecrated in Punjab Province. The gravestones were smashed and defaced, with debris scattered across the cemetery grounds. According to the Department of External Affairs of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community UK, 269 Ahmadi Muslim graves have been vandalized during 11 separate attacks in 2025 alone, and in 2024, 319 gravestones were defiled in 21 incidents.
These acts are not isolated incidents but part of a broader campaign of religious “cleansing,” driven by radical Islamist groups such as the TLP and facilitated by a legal system that criminalizes Ahmadi identity.
The persecution of Hindus in Pakistan has also intensified. On September 17, 2024, the Hindu Rama Pir Temple in Sindh province was attacked by armed terrorists who indiscriminately fired at worshippers, wounding four people. Such attacks on Hindu places of worship are alarmingly frequent. The climate of impunity only encourages deep-seated hostility toward religious minorities.
Forced conversions and underage marriages of Hindu and Christian girls have also surged. Each year in Pakistan, more than 1,000 Christian and Hindu girls, typically between 12 and 25 years, are kidnapped, forced to convert, and married off to Muslim men. Women and children from religious minorities are at high risk of kidnapping, forced conversion and forced marriage. Forced conversion to Islam is not illegal in Pakistan. The authorities rarely take any meaningful action to bring perpetrators to justice, and the police are often refuse to file complaints submitted by the victims or their families.
In addition, human trafficking of girls and women along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a massive problem. A report by the Brookings Institution states:
“Offsetting this was the fact that many of the victims belonged to the Christian community of Pakistan — less surrounded by society’s notions of honor, and less protected because they are marginalized…. That most of the victims belonged to the poor and marginalized Christian community of Pakistan sadly made it easier for Pakistan to divert attention away from the issue without an ensuing public outcry.”
As noted in a 2020 report by the Coalition for Religious Equality and Inclusive Development, ideologically targeted sexual abuse is directed specifically at religious minorities, both for sexual predation but also as a “conquest” to win the girl over to Islam.
The strong influence of Pakistan’s Islamic religious landscape is particularly discriminatory towards women and girls of minority religions. Those minorities in Pakistan endure economic and social marginalization. They are often relegated to menial jobs, denied access to education and government services, and excluded from political representation. In rural areas, land-grabs targeting minority communities are common, with little legal recourse. Women from these communities face compounded discrimination. Literacy rates are significantly lower than both the national average and those of men within their own communities.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has repeatedly raised alarms over the deteriorating state of religious freedom in the country and called for the release of those jailed under Section 298-C of the Pakistan Penal Code, a provision that criminalizes Ahmadis for identifying as Muslim or preaching their faith. The HRCP’s report, “Streets of Fear: Freedom of Religion or Belief in 2024/25,” details mob-led violence and extrajudicial killings.
Pakistan’s fierce blasphemy laws continue to target religious minorities. The HRCP report documents that increasingly, minority individuals accused of blasphemy are lynched by mobs or murdered while seeking police protection. In two separate cases, individuals were extrajudicially executed by law enforcement, highlighting the urgent need for reform within Pakistan’s policing and judicial systems. The rise in hate speech, threats against judicial figures, and the politicization of bar associations only propel a dangerous tilt toward Islamic radicalism within state institutions.
The Jaranwala incident, in which Muslims destroyed at least 24 churches and forcibly displaced hundreds of Christians in August 2023, is just one illustration of violence resulting from the blasphemy laws. Using the blasphemy law to target Christians, Hindus, and Muslim minorities such as the Ahmadis, keeps increasing.
Christians are victims of roughly a quarter of all blasphemy accusations despite being less than 2% of the population. Muslim business rivals accuse Christian men of blasphemy as a means of destroying their business and reputation. Additionally, Christians, Hindus and people from other minority communities typically occupy lower-status jobs and have been referred to as “chura”, a derogatory word meaning “filthy,” reserved for road sweepers and sewage cleaners.
Christians in Pakistan suffer from the volatile security situation, the high level of violence and the lack of effective channels for seeking protection. The police appear more interested in appeasing local Islamic strongmen and keeping things calm than in implementing the law and protecting minorities.
Last October, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif acknowledged the gravity of the situation during a Diwali celebration in Lahore. She urged citizens to recognize the collective responsibility of protecting minorities and emphasized that respect for religious diversity is fundamental to Pakistan’s integrity. Such statements are praiseworthy but rare. Without concrete policy action and accountability, they remain toothless and insufficient.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan has officially been a Muslim state since its independence in 1947. The country’s demographic composition underscores the painful condition of its minorities. With a population of approximately 251.9 million, Muslims constitute 97%. Hindus and Christians each make up just 1.6%. Ahmadis make up a mere 0.2%. These communities are too small to pose any threat to the majority, yet they face unrelenting persecution. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are among the harshest in the world. They prescribe a mandatory death sentence for insulting Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and prison terms for Ahmadis who “pose as Muslims.” These laws often become weapons with which to settle personal scores and incite communal violence.
According to the human rights organization Open Doors, all Christians in Pakistan suffer from institutionalized discrimination. Occupations seen as low and dirty are reserved for Christians by the authorities, as can be seen in job advertisements. Many Christians are poor and are victims of bonded labor, through which they are either forced to convert to Islam or are given in child marriage by their employers. Christian girls in bonded labor situations are more vulnerable to being illegally detained by their employers.
Open Doors notes:
“Pakistan is home to dozens of radical Islamic groups. Increasingly, advisory bodies to the government are completely made up of Islamic scholars who influence the laws. Thousands of madrassas are being run without government scrutiny of how they are funded or what they are teaching. Anyone calling for reform of blasphemy laws is openly threatened by radicals who believe “infidels” deserve death. Banned radical groups often do not dissolve but rebrand, go online or merge with an existing group. Religious sentiments and resulting mob violence are easily stirred up and are targeted against religious minorities, especially Christians, as showcased in the August 2023 violence in Jaranwala. Pakistan suffers from ethnic fragmentation. Balochistan Province and the central Sindh regions are considered beyond the reach of the state authorities. Religious minorities are seen as impure, both for religious reasons and because they do not belong to the ruling ethnic groups.”
The Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a Washington DC-based think tank, has also documented the devastating impact of blasphemy allegations and mob violence on Pakistan’s religious minorities. Its report highlights the surge in attacks on Christians in Punjab during 2023 and 2024, and this year’s continued targeting of Ahmadis. According to the organization, the Ahmadi community endured six faith-based murders in 2024 and three more in the first half of 2025. This pattern of violence is both persistent and escalating.
The international community has increasingly voiced concern over Pakistan’s failure to protect its minorities. The United Nations and several countries have criticized the government’s inaction and called for urgent reforms. Meaningful change, however, is nowhere in sight. The HRCP has urged the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry based on findings from the National Commission for Human Rights, particularly regarding entrapment in blasphemy cases. Such a commission could be a vital step toward justice, but only if it operates independently and is empowered to hold perpetrators accountable.
The Pakistani state’s complicity in the sustained persecution of Hindus, Christians, Ahmadis, Shia Muslims, and Sikhs in Pakistan, as well as critical journalists, whether through silence, legal endorsement, or active participation, needs to be seriously confronted.
The machinery of religious persecution has become lethal, with discriminatory laws and unchecked hate crimes turning faith into a fatal liability. The urgency to act is no longer a matter of principle; it is, for religious minorities, a matter of survival. Reform in Pakistan needs to start by immediately repealing the laws that criminalize belief; by prosecuting those who incite and execute violence, and by giving full protection to equal rights for every citizen, regardless of religion. Minority communities are being hunted, erased and buried under the weight of institutionalized hate.
The European Union should stand for the principles and ideals on which its Generalized System of Preferences was based. At present, it is simply furthering intolerable behavior and embarrassing itself.
Uzay Bulut is a Turkish journalist, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.
Returning the Israeli hostages is not nearly enough. JOSHUA HOFFMAN
Returning the Israeli hostages without destroying Hamas is like treating cancer with painkillers.
OCT 12, 2025
Roei Shalev survived on October 7, 2023.
He survived being shot in the back at the Nova music festival, survived watching terrorists kill his partner Mapal Adam and his close friend Hili Solomon, survived the days and months afterward when grief and shock folded in on themselves and never quite unwrapped.
Two weeks after the massacre his mother, Raffaela, also took her own life. Two years later, in a farewell post that read like the transcript of a wound that could not close, Shalev wrote that he was “burning” and “already dead” on the inside. This past Friday, he was found in a burning car on a highway exit in Israel. He committed suicide.
His death, one more in a pattern of survivors tormented beyond the moment of the attack, was met with the same helplessness that has shadowed this war: sorrow, organized aid, speeches, condolences, headlines, and then the knowledge that none of that stitches up the people whose lives were shattered in ways that do not obey anniversaries or diplomatic milestones.
Every returned hostage matters. Each freed person is a child of someone, a parent, a friend, a life halted and then, one hopes, resumed. Their release is a moral imperative, a human triumph in the face of barbarity.
But to stop at the exchange table, to treat the returning of hostages as the end of the ledger, is to mistake one act of mercy for the whole duty of justice and prevention. The image of a family reunited is necessary and vital; it is not sufficient. Heroic though rescue and negotiation may be, they cannot undo the strategic fact that the tactics which produced those hostages — indiscriminate slaughter, sexual violence, kidnapping, the deliberate weaponization of civilians — remain a template if not obliterated.
The question a grieving country must ask is blunt: Will the civilized world take measures that make it impossible for Hamas to ever again be a model for terror, or will the horror be preserved in memory only, a precedent rather than a warning?
For survivors like Nova festival attendees, the violence did not end when they walked out of the desert, or when a prisoner was brought home. PTSD does not respect ceasefires. The country has watched a cascade of mental-health crises, with survivors repeatedly and publicly describing unrelenting trauma, and with accounts of suicides and near-suicides among the young people who saw what happened there.
Members of civil society and clinicians have warned for months that this is a national mental-health emergency that requires continuous resourcing: long-term professional care, stable funding, outreach that finds people who can’t ask for help, and a social consensus that the living wounds need more than a press conference. To celebrate a hostage’s return while letting the structures that permit devastation remain intact is to celebrate a rescue and ignore a recurrence.
There is a security dimension and a moral-political dimension to making sure “never again” does not become a rhetorical echo. Security demands dismantling the operational capacity of the group that perpetrated the slaughter. That means more than symbolic strikes or ephemeral sanctions; it means sustained international cooperation that removes the command-and-control, the logistics, the safe havens, the financing, and the political cover that allow terror groups to project force and to recruit. It means denying them the prestige that comes from successful, attention-grabbing atrocities.
If Hamas’ tactics are left unpunished in meaningful ways, then those tactics — the mass massacre, the rout of civilian protections, the spectacle of kidnapping and atrocity streamed as propaganda — will be taught to other groups as a playbook for impact and notoriety. The international community cannot be neutral about the mechanics of evil without becoming an unwitting teacher. This is not vengeance for vengeance’s sake; it is prevention.
From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, aircraft hijackings involving Palestinian militant groups were a notable tactic used in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In September 1970, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four airliners bound for New York City and one for London. Three aircraft were forced to land at Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip near Zarqa, Jordan, formerly Royal Air Force Station Zarqa, which then became the “Revolutionary Airport” of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
On June 27, 1976, an Air France flight departed from Tel Aviv, carrying 246 mainly Jewish and Israeli passengers and a crew of 12. The plane flew to Athens, where it picked up an additional 58 passengers, including four hijackers. Just after takeoff, the flight was hijacked by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, ending in the dramatic Israeli rescue at Entebbe. The world applauded Israel’s courage, but it did not punish the perpetrators, their sponsors, or the ideology behind them.
That was the beginning of the problem. The Palestinians’ use of civilian airliners as political weapons went largely unpunished and even glamorized in some corners of the world. Hijackings became the fashionable face of “resistance.” What began as a Palestinian tactic became an international language of terror — copied by revolutionaries, Islamists, and anti-Western extremists everywhere.
The lesson was clear to those watching: Terrorism works. The hijackers didn’t need to win wars; they just needed to hijack the world’s fear. That logic, perfected by Palestinian terror groups, metastasized over decades until September 11, 2001, when Al-Qaeda took the same playbook and turned airplanes into missiles. The Palestinian hijackings of the 1970s were not just crimes against Israelis or Jews; they were the prototype for global terror. The world’s failure to condemn and dismantle that culture of violence allowed the same psychological weapon to evolve.
If the deliberate targeting of civilians is rewarded by influence or by amplification, it will be imitated. If it is exposed, isolated, and erased as an instrument of policy, it can be made unusable as a model. The choice is not abstract. It is measured in dead children, in the lives that spiral into chronic despair, in communities that never recover.
That moral-political posture requires courage from democratic states because it will force uncomfortable questions about alliances, enforcement, and the limits of realpolitik. It will demand coordinated pressure on states and non-state actors that enable terror, such as closing financial pipelines, policing arms transfers, cracking down on networks of support, and refusing diplomatic imprimaturs that grant legitimacy.
It will also mean rebuilding the intelligence and defense architectures that prevent similar infiltrations: better early-warning systems, more robust defense of soft targets, rapid-reaction capabilities that are not purely reactive, and intelligence-sharing that treats mass-casualty scenarios as something the international system must anticipate and forestall. These are technical measures; they are not incompatible with moral clarity.
In fact, they are an expression of it. To provide care and to prosecute crimes, to welcome hostages home and to also remove the conditions that produced those hostages, are complementary obligations: One heals the individual, the other protects the many.
The demand that Hamas be made an example of, that its model be invalidated, often sounds like a call for punitive overreach. That is a misread. Making a group an example to future terrorists does not require cruelty or the erosion of the rule of law; it requires the meticulous application of law, of international cooperation, and of deterrent force that is both proportionate and effective. It requires a legal architecture that holds leaders and logisticians to account, that chokes off material support, that severs the media stage on which their crimes are glorified.
The aim is not to replicate brutality, but to make brutality an instrument that fails strategically. A robust, rights-respecting international response that destroys the business model of terror is not only ethical; it is strategic. It saves lives.
There is an important domestic piece of the work, too. A nation that sees its citizens returned home must not mistake the hostage’s freed body for a healed society. The grief that follows a massacre, and the slow attrition of hope that can culminate in a man burning himself on a highway, are smoking signs of structural neglect.
Long-term funding for mental-health services must be nonpolitical and noncontingent; trauma-informed care must be woven into schools, hospitals, and community centers; social safety nets must be stabilized for families whose breadwinners and anchors were taken or destroyed; memorialization must be paired with active, living support systems that track outcomes and intervene early. Public rhetoric matters: to survivors, phrases like “we will not let them win” ring hollow if the state cannot keep its promises to care for the living. To the world, rhetoric alone is a poor substitute for the durable, tangible investments that reduce suffering and prevent further casualties of war and terror.
Finally, consider the moral calculus for the free world. Returning hostages is an explicit ethical obligation; it is a restitution that cannot be delayed and must be carried out when possible.
But, if the international community allows the apparatus that created the hostages to remain intact, it will have performed a limited justice: one that restores a person to family but leaves the mechanism of harm untouched. That limited justice will then be studied by would-be killers as a viable channel to publicity, bargaining power, and effect. The alternative is to combine the tactical, emotional act of release with a strategy that eliminates the strategic utility of atrocity. This means justice in the fullest sense: rescue for the individual and incapacitation for the model of terror.
Roei Shalev’s life story, and the lives of others like him, demand that we think not only in terms of single acts of rescue but of long arcs of protection. We must ask ourselves whether our response honors the depth of their suffering. Will we invest in healing and structural prevention, or will we applaud hostage returns and then let the currents that produced them run on?
Returning the hostages is a necessary chapter in the moral ledger; it is not the entire book. To keep writing that book as if the last page is the only page is to consign future generations to reread tragedies we might have finally prevented.
If the international community is serious about preserving humanity, about ensuring that barbaric tactics cannot be used as lessons for others, then it must turn the moral urgency that frees hostages into lasting policies that make the criminal method impossible to replicate.
Anything less is a partial mercy; a full duty remains.
Don’t Say What Israel Should Have Done Differently CHANANYA WEISSMAN
An uncomfortable discussion we need to have
OCT 12, 2025
This week we start a new annual Torah cycle with Bereishis. Maybe this time around we will pay better attention and internalize the most basic, fundamental lessons.
Or we can double down again on the same failed ideologies, keep doing the same things, and expect better results. Your choice.
After Adam and Chava ate from the forbidden fruit and tried to hide from Hashem’s presence (which never works) Hashem challenged them. “Did you eat from the tree which I commanded you not to eat from?”
Of course, Hashem knew the answer to this question, and Adam and Chava knew that He knew. Chazal explain that Hashem in His mercy was giving them an opening to take responsibility for their sin and do teshuva, in which case they could have avoided the full brunt of the punishment, and the entire course of history would have been changed for the better.
Instead of taking responsibility, Adam blamed Chava for giving him the fruit, even brazenly noting that Hashem had given Chava to him as a companion in the first place. Not my fault!
Adam did have a point. He wouldn’t have eaten the fruit had Chava not given it to him (and, as the Midrash teaches, wailed and nagged until he relented). Indeed, Chava was punished for her role in causing Adam to sin.
Chava in turn blamed the snake for persuading her to eat the fruit. She too had a point. She would never have taken the fruit if not for the snake’s clever ploys to wear down her better judgment. Indeed, the snake was punished for instigating everything.
However, despite the fact that Adam and Chava both had a point, shifting the blame didn’t earn them clemency; it sealed their fate. Although others had influenced and even pressured them to sin, ultimately it was their decision to eat from the fruit, and they were responsible for the consequences of their own actions.
As if this sort of thing hasn’t happened countless times already, the Jewish world is spilling endless digital ink over the “hostage deal”.
By the way, did you stop to consider who decided it should be called that, and why? Why didn’t they call it the “letting loose an army of terrorists deal”, or just the “terrorist deal” for short?
When I bring this to your attention the answer is obvious, but the fact that I need to bring it to your attention underscores how subtle and sophisticated the brainwashing is — even and especially from media outlets you still believe are somewhat working for you and not for them.
In any case, this “deal” is hardly what you would have accepted in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, nor was this the promised reward after all those “painful sacrifices” you were asked to make. You were promised a resounding victory. You were promised the complete and utter defeat of Hamas. You were promised that the IDF would rescue the hostages, or at least bring Hamas to its knees until they cried uncle and begged you to take the hostages back for nothing.
The sales pitch was not that after two years of extremely painful Molech sacrifices, state leaders, the IDF, and their media mouthpieces would celebrate the return 20 living hostages and 28 dead bodies in exchange for over 2000 genocidal terrorists, tons of supplies, American control over territory you paid so dearly to conquer, a cynical peace prize for Donald Trump, and then have the chutzpah to call it a victory.
Here’s an uncomfortable fact. For all the propaganda about the IDF fighting for the hostages, in nearly two years of operations in Gaza they rescued exactly zero hostages.
The spin doctors will claim that the IDF had to operate carefully to avoid killing hostages, and it’s only because of their resounding victory over Hamas that this incredible terrorist release deal could be made. Best deal in town. Couldn’t have happened any other way. Even Bibi said that anyone who claims otherwise is going against the truth.
We’re supposed to believe the IDF surgically operated so they wouldn’t accidentally kill the hostages, and neither would Hamas, but somehow, after nearly 20,000 IDF soldiers were maimed and killed, and many of the rest were broken mentally and financially, Hamas is desperate enough to exchange 20 hostages for 2000 of their finest killers.
That, and because Lord Trump spoke and it was so.
Are you buying that?
Here’s another uncomfortable fact. In addition to rescuing exactly zero hostages, when the IDF had their best known chance to rescue hostages, three to be exact, they inexplicably shot them dead instead:
On 15 December 2023, three Israeli hostages were killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the Battle of Shuja’iyya in the Gaza Strip. The men had emerged from a building and were approaching a group of IDF soldiers when they were shot dead, in spite of the fact that they were shirtless and visibly unarmed while waving a makeshift white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew.
So let’s recap. IDF brass threatened soldiers who warned them about an impending invasion, allowed one of the most fortified borders in the world to be conquered with a bulldozer, pickup trucks, and a donkey, ordered soldiers to stand down for 8+ hours, while hordes of executioners leisurely hunted down Jews, took selfies, and sat down for meals, and children and old men with canes had time to loot their communities, then jailed soldiers who defied orders and rushed to defend Jewish communities…
After that totally understandable and forgivable “intelligence failure”, for which no one was prosecuted for reckless manslaughter, let alone treason, the IDF proceeded over the next two years to destroy many thousands of Jewish soldiers physically, mentally, spiritually, and financially, ostensibly for the sake of saving the very hostages they allowed to be taken, and comes away with a final score of zero hostages saved and three executed in cold blood.
Then the IDF “forced” Hamas to accept a deal as bad as winning the lottery three times in a row, then declared victory
I guess that settles it.
The media dutifully broadcast this message without the slightest hint of a smirk. See here.
So while the propaganda machine is busy making sure you focus strictly on the return of a few hostages, crown Trump as your lord and savior, and celebrate the very people who brought this destruction upon you, their mercenaries in Gaza (and Israel proper) are planning the next October 7, while the Erev Rav are planning the next intelligence failure.
Here’s the thing. It’s easy to blame “Israel” for once again capitulating to our external enemies, bowing to American pressure, and making senselessly lopsided deals. It’s easy to lecture “Israel” on what they should do and should have done. Many “right wing” and “religious Zionists” are once again playing that predictable game.
They’re making a terrible mistake.
They should blame themselves and everyone like them.
If, in the aftermath of October 7, you admonished people that “now is not the time to ask questions”, you should blame yourself. If you insisted that we must let the most incompetent “intelligence failures” in history send our loved ones into “war”, and only afterward ask questions, you need to face some uncomfortable questions, too. You share responsibility for all the soldiers who were maimed and killed for nothing. (By the way, can we ask questions yet, or is it conveniently irrelevant now?)
Based on official reports, the overwhelming majority were killed in death traps they never should have entered, ambushes they never should have been exposed to, friendly fire incidents, and truly bizarre accidents. The state and their media mouthpieces cycnially referred to all the above as “dying in combat”. I documented it here.
You didn’t let that deter you or even give you pause. You demanded more. You share the blame.
If you allowed yourself to be deluded that this pretextual “war” was a milchemes mitzvah, or you otherwise cheered for it and demanded more of it, you share the blame.
If you lionized the soldiers who died senseless deaths for nothing as heroes who died al Kiddush Hashem, thereby encouraging more to follow suit, you will have to answer for that.
If you gave them chizuk to keep going back for more, when otherwise they might have gotten hungry, and fed up, and refused to run into that booby-trapped building to “search for a tunnel” or whatever, and told their soulless commanders where to shove their uniforms, you might as well have played music for the Jews who went into the crematoria.
None of this absolves the snakes. They will get what is coming to them in full measure, God willing very soon. But just like Adam and Chava were remiss in shifting the blame for their own decisions and actions to others, those who supported our enemies from within should spend less time blaming them, and take responsibility for their own mistakes.
If you’re still supporting the very people and institutions that sold you out over and over and over again, you have forfeited the right to be shocked and complain when they sell you out…again. You allowed them to do it. You helped them do it.
How many times does Lucy need to pull the football away from Charlie Brown before he should stop blaming her and start blaming himself? This is what she does. If you keep going back for more, it’s on you.
How many times do the Erev Rav and their un-Jewish army need to show their true colors, their absolute contempt for you, before you stop cheerleading for them and inviting them to abuse you even more? This is what they do. If you keep going back for more, it’s on you.
Don’t tell me what Israel should have done differently. Tell me what you should have done differently.
And then start doing it.
If there were actually two sides in this “war”, and I were Hamas, I would insist that haredi draft dodgers be released from prison in any deal, just to see if Israel blinks.
I saw this billboard today by the entrance to Jerusalem. This creepy message is sponsored by an extremely wealthy, extremely Christian organization operating in the heart of Jerusalem.
Cyrus was no tzaddik, Trump is no savior, and these messianic Christians are no friends of the Jewish people.
Arutz Sheva, which some people still believe is a trusted bastion of right wing religious Zionist news and views, and not a controlled opposition mouthpiece for state propaganda, is busy celebrating Bibi, Trump, the IDF’s incredible “victory”, and the (presumed) impending return of the hostages.
They are not outraged by the terrorist surrender deal. They are outraged that people in Tel Aviv booed Netanyahu. In front of American dignitaries, no less!
Meanwhile, Michael Mordechai Nachmani was killed while the IDF was surrendering territory our slave soldiers would have been better off not entering in the first place. Although the media generally frames it that he died “in combat” or “while fighting” or “during operations”, he was picked off by a sniper while withdrawing.
The media also dutifully emphasized that Nachmani was killed right before the ceasefire went into effect, as if that somehow makes it okay.
Who knows? If he was killed just after it went into effect, they’d have every reason to lie about it, because right now we really need to be gushing over the hostages, and Trump, and the IDF’s smashing success, and not being sticklers over when another precious Jew was killed for no reason.
The more the controlled media emphasizes something, the less I believe it. That should be our relationship with pathological liars, even if they occasionally tell the truth.
Either way, his death, like so many others, was not a kiddush Hashem.
The folly of releasing Hamas terrorists for peace BY Tom Gross
12 October 2025 The Spectator
Sorry to spoil the party, but there’s one aspect of this week’s Middle East peace deal which is pure madness.
As part of the US-brokered ceasefire in Gaza, Israel is set to free 250 Palestinian terrorists serving lengthy prison sentences for murder and other serious offences. Many of them have boasted of their crimes and said they would happily carry them out again. (Up to 1,700 Hamas fighters captured during the current war are also set to be freed, but may be worth releasing if this deal brings an end to the conflict.)
This kind of terrible deal-making will surely only encourage the future kidnapping of other innocent people by terrorists in order to secure the release of other murderers
Israelis can be brilliant at many things. But sometimes they get it very wrong. From the outset, it has been foolish for Israeli negotiators (and later President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff) to even entertain the idea that they will release convicted mass murderers and suicide bomb planners in exchange for innocent Israeli kidnap victims.
To take one example: Mahmoud Qawasmeh, a 45-year-old senior Hamas member who was previously released during the lopsided 2011 Gilad Shalit terrorist-for-hostage exchange. He then went on to orchestrate the 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, for which he was re-arrested only last year in March. He is due to be released under the new Trump plan.
What are the bets that in future Qawasmeh will go on to murder again and be arrested a third time (probably after hiding in some UN-affiliated hospital) and then released yet again in some future lopsided hostages for terrorists deal?
Another terrorist slated to be released this week is Imad Qawasmeh, currently serving 16 life sentences for organising a double suicide bus bombing in which 16 Israelis were killed and over 100 injured in 2004 in the southern city of Beersheba. Among the victims was a three-and-a-half-year-old boy killed while sitting on his mother’s lap. (Twenty-thousand Hamas supporters in Gaza took to the streets to celebrate that attack the next day, according to Reuters.)
Then there is Morad Bader Abdullah Adais, a 25-year-old Palestinian convicted of stabbing to death ith a kitchen knife Daphna Meir, a 39-year-old Israeli mother of six. After the murder, he allegedly returned home to calmly watch a film with his family.
Next up is Hilmi Abdul Karim Muhammad Hammash: sentenced for coordinating a Jerusalem suicide bus bombing in 2004 that killed 11 Israelis and wounded 50 others.
It is not just terrorists from Hamas who are set to be freed. Iyad Abu al-Rub, a terrorist from the even more radical Islamic Jihad group, who was convicted of orchestrating a series of deadly suicide bombings in Israel that killed 13 people between 2003 and 2005, is to be released. The suicide bombs he planned included one at a dance club in Tel Aviv, another at a shopping mall in Netanya, and a third at an outdoor food market in Hadera, north of Tel Aviv.
Of course, I want the hostages held in Gaza to be released. But this kind of terrible deal-making will surely only encourage the future kidnapping of other innocent people by terrorists in order to secure the release of other murderers.
I wrote almost the exact same sentence in 2011 when I criticised the Gilad Shalit deal that, among others, freed Yahya Sinwar, who went on to become the architect of the October 7 massacre. I want peace as much as anybody but releasing murderers for innocent kidnap victims in the absence of a proper commitment to peace by Hamas is not the way to get there.
As soon as the hostages have been released tomorrow, world leaders including Keir Starmer will gather in Cairo under President Trump’s auspices. They must tell Hamas’s backers Qatar and Turkey that Hamas should be happy with peace and prosperity for its own sake and not be rewarded with the freeing of mass murderers. Once the hostages are released it is still not too late for the prisoners to be kept in jail to serve out their sentences after all.
Hamas Agrees To Release ALL Hostages In Deal, But Gaza Endgame Left Unclear [1:04:10] Yishai Fleisher
Oct 9, 2025 – Yishai live on Trump’s Gaza End Game and Hostage Release – will Hamas take a break to attack again or be defeated? Is regional peace breaking out. General (R) Avivi and MK Simcha Rothman join Yishai to cover all the breaking news and provide in-depth analysis.
A Salute to the Men and Women Who Keep Israel Alive JOSHUA HOFFMAN
In the IDF, we see the Jewish story itself — because, when Israelis fight, they fight for life.
OCT 11, 2025
In the two years since October 7, 2023, Israel has lived through one of the most painful and heroic chapters in its history.
The seven-front war with Hamas and its allies has tested not only the strength of the Israel Defense Forces, but the very soul of the nation. Every inch of Israel’s security, every ounce of its resilience, has been carried on the shoulders of men and women in uniform — soldiers who left their families, their careers, their daily routines, and their comforts to defend their homeland.
Israel’s toll in this war stands at 472 fallen heroes, among them two police officers and three Defense Ministry civilian contractors. But behind that number are thousands more who carry wounds, seen and unseen. There are parents who buried their children, children who will grow up without parents, and a nation forever changed by the sacrifices made in the defense of life itself. Each of those 472 names is a universe. Each was someone’s son, daughter, sibling, or best friend. Each represented the unbreakable link between the State of Israel and the Jewish people.
When the call went out for reservists in the immediate days that followed October 7th, hundreds of thousands answered. They came from every corner of Israeli life — engineers, artists, doctors, teachers, startup founders, musicians, and students. Some were abroad and dropped everything to fly home. Others packed their bags in the middle of family dinners or business meetings and kissed their loved ones goodbye without knowing when, or if, they’d return. They left behind newborns, elderly parents, companies they’d built, dreams they’d been chasing. And they did it without hesitation. Because, in Israel, the army is not just an institution; it’s part of the family.
Many of my own friends were called into reserves. Men and women I shared Shabbat dinners with, people whose weddings I danced at, whose children I played with, who laughed with me over a beer — suddenly they were back in uniform, carrying weapons instead of laptops, sleeping in army base beds instead of their own.
It is impossible to describe to an outsider what that feels like. The helplessness. The waiting. The constant checking of the news, multiple times a day, holding your breath as new photos of fallen soldiers appear, hoping you don’t see a familiar face. In Israel, every casualty announcement feels personal, because it almost always is. The distance between “a soldier fell” and “someone I know fell” is heartbreakingly thin.
And behind those soldiers stood mothers — mothers whose hearts broke twice. Once when they sent their children into the army the first time, and again when they watched them go back years later, as reservists, now husbands and fathers themselves. These mothers, who raised their sons and daughters through sirens and fears, found themselves reliving the same anguish all over again. They packed their children’s bags, kissed their grandchildren goodbye, and stood at the doorway with trembling hands and tearful eyes, praying for the strength to let go once more.
Their courage is quiet but immense, the courage of women who have carried generations of Jewish history on their backs, who have lived through the unthinkable and yet still believe in tomorrow. It is the unique anguish and strength of the Israeli mother: to know the cost of life in Israel and still choose to give life to it.
But the IDF does not fight alone. Behind every soldier stands a nation that mobilized as one. Parents turned their homes into logistics hubs; volunteers packed meals and collected supplies; schoolchildren wrote letters to soldiers they’d never met. The lines between the front and the home front blurred — because, in Israel, there is no such thing as “someone else’s war.” When the army goes to battle, the nation goes with it.
That sense of collective duty, and collective vulnerability, is the DNA of the IDF. It’s what makes it different from any other army in the world. The IDF was born not to conquer, but to defend a people who had known statelessness and vulnerability for 2,000 years. Every soldier carries that memory, whether consciously or not.
The IDF’s ethos is built on three pillars: courage, responsibility, and solidarity. Courage not only to fight, but to make moral choices in the fog of war. Responsibility not only to defend the nation, but to safeguard its humanity. Solidarity not only with comrades-in-arms, but with the entire people of Israel. Every citizen, every community, every child.
And that solidarity extends far beyond Jews. The IDF is not just a “Jewish army”; it is the army of Israel. Serving within its ranks are Jews, Christians, Druze, Bedouins, and Muslims. Shoulder to shoulder, they defend the same land, the same skies, the same people. Christian and Muslim Arabs serve in combat units, Bedouin trackers risk their lives hunting terrorists in the desert, Druze officers command battalions.
Their loyalty is not measured by religion but by shared purpose: the defense of a homeland that protects freedom and human dignity for all. In their unity lies one of Israel’s quiet miracles: that a country so small and so diverse can forge such unity under fire.
In Israel, when something happens — when there’s a threat, a terror attack, a disaster — people don’t ask, “Where’s the police?” They ask, “Where’s the army?” Because the IDF is more than a military; it is the heartbeat of the country. It is there in times of war and peace, in search-and-rescue missions, humanitarian operations, and natural disasters. It is the first responder, the last line of defense, and the constant reminder that the Jewish People will never again be helpless.
And there is something else, something that defines the moral line between Israel and its enemies. When Israelis lose soldiers, we call them heroes. When our enemies lose fighters, they call them martyrs. Do you see the difference? Our heroes die protecting life. Their people die pursuing death. Our soldiers fall shielding civilians; theirs fall hiding behind them. We mourn our dead with tears; they celebrate theirs with parades.
That difference — between a nation that sanctifies life and one that glorifies death — is not a detail. It is the very heart of this conflict. The IDF fights to live. Hamas and its patrons fight so others will die.
Perhaps nowhere was that moral struggle more visible than in one of the most heartbreaking moments of the war: when Israeli soldiers, in the chaos of battle, accidentally killed three Israeli hostages who had escaped captivity in Gaza. It was an unspeakable tragedy, a moment that shook the entire country to its core. These soldiers, already burdened with the impossible weight of combat, suddenly had to carry a pain beyond words.
But what happened next revealed the soul of Israel. One of the hostages’ mothers, instead of expressing anger, went straight to the soldiers. She told them she did not blame them. She praised them for defending the country, for risking their lives to bring others home. In her grief, she gave them grace. In her heartbreak, she reminded all of Israel that the IDF’s fight is not against the innocent, but for the innocent. That moment captured the essence of who we are: a people who mourn our mistakes even as we honor the purity of the intent behind every act of defense.
Many of the soldiers who fell were barely adults, boys and girls who should have been in university lectures, on first dates, or planning trips after the army. Instead, they carried a nation’s safety on their shoulders. They are young in age, but ancient in spirit, heirs to generations who understood that freedom has never been free for the Jewish People.
Behind each of them stand families who carry a burden that words can never ease. They are the quiet heroes who keep living when the world has moved on — lighting candles, visiting graves, keeping the memory of their sons and daughters alive. In their strength, Israel finds its moral compass. They remind us that every soldier’s life was not only lost; it was given.
For soldiers who served in Gaza, the war has been more than a military campaign; it has been a confrontation with the darkest evil. They fought in tunnels and ruins, in cities turned to rubble by the cruelty of those who hide behind civilians and children. They rescued hostages, recovered the bodies of friends, and witnessed horrors that words cannot ain.
Yet, evmid that darkness, they upheld the values that make Israel what it is: striving to protect innocent life, delivering aid even to enemy civilians, and maintaining their humanity when others had abandoned theirs.
The children who watched their fathers and mothers don uniforms these past two years will one day wear their own. They will remember the stories, the courage, the songs sung in the bases, the names whispered at memorials. And when their time comes, they will step forward — not out of hate, but out of love. Because in Israel, to serve is to protect the miracle of life.
During the war, I visited wounded soldiers in the hospital — young men lying in beds with shrapnel wounds, burns, and missing limbs. I expected sadness. What I found instead was a fierce, almost defiant spirit. Every one of them, without exception, said the same thing: “I just want to get back to my unit.” They weren’t thinking about medals or recognition; they were thinking about their brothers and sisters still fighting in Gaza.
Even in pain, even bandaged and broken, they were eager to return to the front lines. There is something indescribable about that kind of courage, the kind born not from glory, but from love. Love of country. Love of comrades. Love of life.
The IDF is not just a defense force; it is a moral force. It stands as a living refutation of the lie that power and ethics cannot coexist. In a region where brutality is often glorified, the IDF has shown that strength can serve compassion, and that the sword of Israel can be wielded with restraint, not vengeance. The soldiers of the IDF did not just defend a country; they defended a principle: that Jews have the right to live freely, safely, and proudly in their own land.
The IDF is the living continuation of a 4,000-year story. The same people who once wandered powerless through the deserts of exile now defend their homeland in uniform, guided by the same ancient faith in life, justice, and hope. Every Israeli soldier is a link in that unbroken chain — from David to today. They stand not only for a country, but for the eternal right of the Jewish People to exist in peace and dignity.
To the soldiers who fought, to the reservists who returned home changed, to the families who bore the weight of absence and fear, to the parents who found the strength to say goodbye again, to the medics, engineers, intelligence officers, and volunteers who made survival possible — Israel owes a debt that cannot be repaid.
The story of the IDF is the story of a people who refuse to give up on life, who turn grief into unity, who fight not for conquest but for existence. And though the cost has been unbearably high, their sacrifice ensures that the light of Israel continues to burn bright.
May the memory of the fallen be a blessing. May the wounded find healing. And may the living carry forward their legacy with pride, strength, and the unshakable conviction that Am Yisrael Chai — the Nation of Israel lives.
Tylenol and Autism: More to the Story By Joan Swirsky
October 11, 2025 American Thinker
In 2020, the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that one in 36 children (approximately four percent of boys and one percent of girls) was estimated to have autism-spectrum disorder, estimates that were significantly higher than those in all previous years.
But just five years later, according to the press conference held just weeks ago on September 22, President Trump — in the presence of U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz — announced that the Department of Health and Human Services stated that autism had surged in America nearly 400% and now affects 1 in 31 American children…
…and that this alarming statistic was a result of pregnant women taking Tylenol during their pregnancies!
Within milliseconds, everyone weighed in, from a skeptical Scientific American to the hearty support of the Icahn School in the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.
Here, Dr. Josh Redd explains in plain English why Tylenol is so bad for pregnant women.
Besides the pros and cons, disturbing facts emerged, not the least of which is that the FDA knew about the Tylenol-autism link over a decade and a half ago…but did nothing! Talk about “follow the money”!
In fact, as early as 2019, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) study recommended — again, with no follow-through — that the labels be revised to advise pregnant women to “be careful about casual use of acetaminophen when it is not strongly needed for pain or other purposes.”
It took a few years, but since September 2022, according to the BirthInjuryCenter.org , over 100 lawsuits have been filed nationwide against acetaminophen manufacturers, claiming damage over the failure to warn pregnant users that Tylenol and generic versions may increase the risk of having a baby with autism and/or ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).
Speaking of Failures
By that I mean that this potentially life-altering announcement omitted — actually failed — to include a quite obvious cause of autism’s precipitous rise over the past several decades.
To explain: In the early ’70s, I worked nights — the 11 P.M. to 7 A.M. shift — as a delivery room nurse at a university-affiliated hospital near my home on Long Island. It was a revolutionary time in obstetrics, when the Lamaze method of “prepared childbirth” and the use of sonograms to visualize fetuses were gaining popularity.
Actually, ultrasound technology was first developed in Scotland in the mid-1950s by obstetrician Ian Donald and engineer Tom Brown to detect industrial flaws in ships. By the end of the ’50s, ultrasound was routinely used in Glasgow hospitals, but it was not until the 1970s that it was used in American hospitals to check that the developing baby, placenta, and amniotic fluid were normal and to detect abnormal conditions such as birth defects and ectopic pregnancies.
At the end of the ’70s, I became a certified Lamaze teacher and spent the next 22 years giving weekly classes to couples in my home. In a very real way, I had my own laboratory, as I learned directly from my clients about the increasing escalation of sonogram exams they had as the decades elapsed.
In the early 1980s, it was common for only one or two out of the ten women in my classes to have a sonogram. In just a few years, every woman in my classes had had a sonogram. And in the late ’80s and ’90s, almost every woman had not one sonogram, but often two or three or four or five — starting as early as three or four weeks’ gestation and extending, in some instances, right up to delivery!
It was in the ’90s, in fact, that it occurred to me that the scary rise in the incidence of autism might be linked to the significant rise in ultrasound exams. Over the years, I’ve posited my theory to a number of people, written letters to the editors of newspapers — including to the N.Y. Times, for which I wrote for over 20 years, but they still refused to publish my letter — and emailed my idea to one of the top news people at the Fox News Network, but the “we report/you decide” powers that be on that TV station strangely decided not to report on this subject.
I contacted autism researchers Dr. Marcel Just and Dr. Diane L. Williams, who told me via email that Dr. Pasko Rakic at Yale was, indeed, exploring the autism-ultrasound link.
Then, in 2006, I found an article in Midwifery Today, “Questions about Prenatal Ultrasound and the Alarming Increase in Autism,” by writer-researcher Caroline Rodgers.
“The steep increase in autism,” Rodgers wrote, “goes beyond the U.S.: It is a “global phenomenon” that “has emerged … across vastly different environments and cultures.”
However, Rodgers added, “what all industrial countries do have in common is … the use of routine prenatal ultrasound on pregnant women. In countries with nationalized health care, where virtually all pregnant women are exposed to ultrasound, the autism rates are even higher than in the U.S., where due to disparities in income and health insurance, some 30 percent of pregnant women do not yet undergo ultrasound scanning.”
Aha! Could this be why blacks and Hispanics in America continue to lag behind whites in the development of autism?
Dolphins, Whales…Relevance?
In the summer of 2012, as many as 3,000 dead dolphins were found in Peru. Researchers at the Organization for the Conservation of Aquatic Animals (ORCA), a Peruvian marine animal conservation organization, attributed the mass deaths to the use of deep-water sonar by ships in nearby waters.
Even earlier, in June of 2008, four days after a Navy helicopter was using controversial sonar equipment during training exercises off the Cornish coast in Great Britain, 26 dolphins died in a mass stranding.
These events — and literally thousands that are similar — are relevant because many mass deaths and strandings of whales and dolphins have been attributed to the sonar waves emitted from Navy ships.
In 2009, an article in Scientific American by John Slocum explained that sonar (sound navigation and ranging) systems, which were first developed by the U.S. Navy to detect enemy submarines, “generate slow-rolling sound waves topping out at around 235 decibels; the world’s loudest rock bands top out at only 130. These sound waves can travel for hundreds of miles under water and can retain an intensity of 140 decibels as far as 300 miles from their source.”
Slocum wrote that a successful 2003 lawsuit against the Navy brought by the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to restrict the use of low-frequency sonar in waters rich in marine wildlife was upheld by two lower courts, but the Supreme Court “ruled that the Navy should be allowed to continue the use of some mid-frequency sonar testing for the sake of national security.”
Two quick questions: If sonar can kill fully developed dolphins, what effect, then, does it have on the developing brains of in utero embryos and fetuses? And why was the massive use of sonograms during pregnancy not even considered an area of research in our government’s investigation?
And Then There’s the Heat!
Just as concerning, as far back 1982, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s study, “Effects of Ultrasound on Biological Systems,” concluded that “neurological, behavioral, developmental, immunological, hematological changes and reduced fetal weight can result from exposure to ultrasound.” Two years later, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reported that when birth defects occurred, the acoustic output of sonograms was usually high enough to cause considerable heat.
And yet, in 1993, the FDA approved an eightfold increase in the potential acoustical output of ultrasound equipment! Ostensibly, this increase was to enhance visualization of the heart and small vessels during microsurgery. Clearly, the health and well-being of developing fetuses was not a consideration!
Getting back to those embryos and fetuses, Rodgers explained that “when the transducer from the ultrasound is positioned over the part of the fetus the operator is trying to visualize, the fetus may be feeling vibrations, heat, or both.”
Rodgers then cited a warning the Food and Drug Administration issued way back in 2004: “Even at low levels, [ultrasound] laboratory studies have shown it can have … jarring vibrations” — one study compared the noise to a subway coming into a station — “and a rise in temperature.”
The cause of autism, Rodgers wrote, “has been pinned on everything from ‘emotionally remote’ mothers … to vaccines, genetics, immunological disorders, environmental toxins and maternal infections. A far simpler possibility … is the pervasive use of prenatal ultrasound, which can cause potentially dangerous thermal effects.”
Imagine how these assaults affect the developing brain of a fetus!
Enter Hard Science
In August 2006, Pasko Rakic, M.D., chair of Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Neurobiology, announced the results of a study in which pregnant mice underwent various durations of ultrasound. The brains of the offspring showed damage that was also found in the brains of people with autism.
The research, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, also implicated ultrasound in neurodevelopmental problems in children, such as dyslexia, epilepsy, mental retardation, and schizophrenia, and showed that damage to brain cells increased with longer exposures.
Dr. Rakic’s study, Rodgers said, “is just one of many animal experiments and human studies conducted over the years indicating that prenatal ultrasound can be harmful to babies.”
Follow the Money
In The Daily Beast, Jennifer Margulis, author of Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Baby before Their Bottom Line, wrote that Dr. Rakic “concluded that all nonmedical use of ultrasound on pregnant women should be avoided.”
In her research, Margulis said that she discovered that “there is mounting evidence that overexposure to sound waves — or perhaps exposure to sound waves at a critical time during fetal development — is to blame for the astronomic rise in neurological disorders among America’s children.”
Clearly, there is a vast human tragedy — a true man-made disaster — taking place before our eyes.
For whatever reasons — follow the money? — the mountain of evidence that points to a causal relationship between prenatal ultrasound exams and an escalating pandemic of autism is being systematically ignored.
Could it have anything to do with the huge investments doctors and scientists have made in ultrasound technology, which, according to Jennifer Margulis, “adds more than $1 billion to the cost of caring for pregnant women in America each year”?
Could it have anything to do with the revenue now pouring like an avalanche into the coffers of diagnostic and treatment centers and classrooms?
Could it have anything to do with modern journalism’s almost complete abandonment of hard-nosed reporting and life-saving exposés?
As Caroline Rodgers said, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to the subject of autism, and that elephant is the worldwide blitzkrieg of ultrasound exams on pregnant women, exams that have bombarded the babies they’re carrying with the brain-warping sound waves and heat that will continue to affect them every second of their autistic lives.
Yoo-hoo, President Trump, RFK Jr., and Dr. Oz! It’s way past time to give pregnancy sonograms the same attention and warnings you gave so confidently to Tylenol!
Joan Swirsky is a New York–based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.
Everything Wrong With the Gaza Peace Plan [38:54] Daniel Greenfield
October 10, 2025 – The Gaza peace plan won’t bring peace, won’t disarm Hamas and gets us right back into nation building without learning anything from our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
