November 14, 2023

Tuesday, November 14, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Trump calls his political opponents “vermin,” evoking comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini from many quarters.

Watch his speech here. 👇

Fascism Expert Offers Truly Chilling Take On Donald Trump’s ‘Vermin’ Rant.

Fascism expert Jason Stanley on Sunday said former President Donald Trump’s Veterans Day vow to purge the “vermin”-like “radical left” more than just echoed Nazi Germany dictator Adolf Hitler.

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan asked the Yale University professor, who authored “How Fascism Works,” if he was “wrong to make the historical comparison to antisemitic propaganda during the Nazi years.”

No,” Stanley replied. “It doesn’t echo ‘Mein Kampf’ ― this is textbook ‘Mein Kampf.’”

“Any antisemite will hear this vocabulary as directed against Jews,” he argued.

Watch the video here:

Hitler details his political ideology in his 1925 autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf,” which translates to “My Struggle.”

During a Saturday speech in Claremont, New Hampshire, Trump said if he wins back the White House in 2024, he would go after his perceived enemies.

He wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social that he would “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.”

The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within,” the Republican 2024 front-runner added. “Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” (HuffPost).

From Victor Shi, Gen Z.

From the journalist Jonathan Alter.

From former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.

https://x.com/liz_cheney/status/1724070176558100609?s=61&t=I_Od53CbnPTsbLcD0baXPg

From the New York Times.

After Calling Foes ‘Vermin,’ Trump Campaign Warns Its Critics Will Be ‘Crushed’

The former president’s Veterans Day speech used language similar to the dehumanizing rhetoric wielded by dictators like Hitler and Mussolini.

“Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said, “and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

At recent rallies and events, Mr. Trump has compared immigrants coming over the border to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from the horror movie “The Silence of the Lambs.”

He called on shoplifters to be shot in a speech in California, and over the weekend in New Hampshire, he again called for drug dealers to be subject to the death penalty. He has insinuated that a military general whom he appointed as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for treason.

Last month, Mr. Trump told a right-wing website that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase recalling white supremacist ideology and comments made by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf.”
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Virginia Update.

Last week, the Democrats reclaimed the General Assembly, the Virginia Legislature consisting of the Virginia Senate and the House of Delegates. Much has happened since Election Day.

Virginia House makes history by nominating first Black speaker.

RICHMOND — Don L. Scott Jr. has been in the Navy, in law school and in prison, and that unusual path has brought him to the doorstep of someplace completely new:

Scott, 58, of Portsmouth, became the first Black person chosen to become Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates since the body’s origins in 1619, the same year the first Africans arrived in chains on Virginia’s shore.

The selection of Scott as speaker-designee during a Democratic caucus meeting Saturday, widely expected following the party’s majority win in Tuesday’s legislative elections, sets up the likelihood that Black lawmakers will run both chambers of Virginia’s General Assembly, another historic first. Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R), the first Black woman elected statewide in Virginia, presides over the state Senate, where Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) is the first Black woman to serve as president pro-tempore.

When Democratic senators choose their leadership next week, Sen. Mamie Locke (D-Hampton) is in contention to become the first Black majority leader, which would complete an unprecedented concentration of Black leadership in the former capital of the Confederacy, and possibly in the South.

“It is historic,” former governor L. Douglas Wilder, the first African American elected governor of any state since Reconstruction, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s celebratory, but it’s not an endgame — it’s a beginning in terms of what needs to be done.”

But the transformation of leadership in Richmond is a major symbolic shift in a city that treasures symbolism, where just three years ago the graffiti-covered statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee towering over Monument Avenue became an international icon of racial reckoning in reaction to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Today that statue is gone, taken down after 131 years of glorifying the lingering spirit of the Lost Cause. Scott said he understands the stakes if he takes up the gavel in a Capitol where White leaders once prohibited people who looked like him from learning to read or even owning dogs, where for a century after the Civil War policies were hatched to keep Black Virginians from voting and, through “massive resistance,” to shutter schools rather than let Black children learn with White ones.

“I know there were so many other African American leaders … who were probably smarter than me, that were probably as tenacious and persistent as me. But they never got this opportunity because of their color,” he said in an interview Friday. “I carry all of those people with me. I think about those people who every time I walk in the Capitol and I see some of the shrines to some folks who probably owned enslaved people. I’m conscious of those enslaved people … and what they had to go through, and how their humanity was discounted in that very chamber.”

The Democratic caucus on Saturday also chose Del. Charniele L. Herring (Alexandria) as majority leader and Del. Kathy Tran (Fairfax) as the first person of Asian or Pacific Island descent to serve as caucus chairwoman.

Democrats reveled in the historic nature of their choices on Saturday. “Proudest vote of my life (After Obama)” delegate-elect Joshua Cole said on X (formerly Twitter).

The vote for speaker will not be official until January, when the new General Assembly is sworn in and the full chamber will elect its leader under the new Democratic majority. By tradition, the minority party supports the choice so the vote is unanimous — and top Republicans have already extended praise to Scott.

House Speaker Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) on Saturday tweeted congratulations to Scott, and promised to “work with the incoming Speaker to ensure a seamless transition of the institution.”

Youngkin called to say congratulations late Wednesday, Scott said. Earle-Sears, asked Friday about her fellow history-maker, said in a text to The Post that “the success and comeback of Don Scott is proof that Virginia is not back in 1963,” when her own father faced discrimination. She promised to work with Scott “for the betterment of all Virginians. All means all.”

Scott’s arrival at this point in his career is as unlikely as it is rapid, coming at the start of just his third term in office.

Born in Houston, he was raised by a single mother who had six kids and never made more than $28,500 in any year of her working life, Scott said. He stuttered as a child, but tested into gifted programs that saw him bused to White schools in what might as well have been another world.

Scott majored in agriculture at Texas A&M University, then served a stint in the Navy. Next he opted for law school at Louisiana State University, and that’s when he made the greatest mistake of his life. In 1994 during his final year of law school, Scott was arrested by federal agents in Mobile, Ala., for carrying thousands of dollars in drug money tied to a crack cocaine ring, according to court documents.

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Scott maintains he never handled any drugs but made a “bad decision” to help a friend. He pleaded no contest and finished his law degree just in time to begin a 10-year sentence in federal prison. Released after serving fewer than eight years, Scott went to live with an uncle in Delaware who got him a series of jobs and enforced strict discipline. Eventually Scott climbed the ladder at a workforce developmentcompany, married a dentist and settled down in Portsmouth.

With a felony conviction, Scott was prohibited from voting by a Virginia law that’s the most draconian in the nation. The one way out is to appeal directly to a governor — which Scott did, getting his rights restored by Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell about a decade ago.

In 2014, Scott spent six months studying for the Virginia bar exam, passing on his first try. He quickly built up a reputation in Portsmouth for taking — and winning — tough cases. His public stature got him elected to the General Assembly in the blue wave of 2019, which brought two years of Democratic power as the legislature worked with Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to enact sweeping changes — such as abolishing the death penalty, legalizing marijuana and tightening gun control.

When the party lost its House majority in 2021 and Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor, Scott and several colleagues ousted Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax) as their leader.

Filler-Corn had been the first woman and first Jew to serve as speaker of the Virginia House.

She said Friday that she would be pleased to see Scott make history of his own.

“This is another historic milestone and a victory for Virginians,” Filler-Corn said via email. “We are better as a Commonwealth when our elected leaders reflect the diversity of our communities.”

As minority leader, Scott put a sharper edge on Democrats in the House. He repeatedly tagged the other party for being “MAGA Trump Republicans.” The first week of Youngkin’s administration, Scott took to the floor of the House and questioned the religious faith of the publicly pious governor, saying it wasn’t reflected in his crusade against “critical race theory” and “racial equity.”

Youngkin responded by walking across the Capitol to meet in Scott’s office, a display of power on Scott’s part that stirred whispers around the legislature.

Asked about his provocative approach, Scott made no apology. “Democrats spend a lot of time being right on policy and being wrong on politics … And I think we have to do both,” he said.

Calling himself a “pragmatic progressive,” Scott said he knows his leadership will only succeed if he can help Democrats — and Republicans — deliver change that improves the lives of Virginians. He said he wants “a reset” with Youngkin, and agrees with the governor that all sides can find common ground on areas such as education, mental health funding and creating good jobs — a message Youngkin delivered in a news conference on Wednesday.

But there are also some areas where Scott is ready to forge ahead with the power of the majority, if necessary. Specifically: beginning the process to seek three constitutional amendments — to enshrine the right to an abortion, affirm the right to same-sex marriage and allow the automatic restoration of rights to people convicted of felonies. In Virginia, amendments are put to a public vote after passing both chambers of the General Assembly with simple majorities in two sessions separated by House elections, which are every two years. The governor is not involved.

Wilder, who has famously confounded his fellow Democrats by occasionally befriending Republicans — such as Youngkin — for the sake of getting things done, said his top advice for Scott would be to deliver results.

“Being elected the first Black or the second Black or any Black is not what it’s about,” Wilder said. “It’s about being the most effective person. … The people of Virginia will gauge and judge based on performance and levels of competence, not the color of your skin. And there’s no time to rest on laurels.”

Scott, Wilder might be gratified to know, said the same thing: “Race is not as important as it used to be. People want competence.”

And Scott also declared that he isn’t planning to rest on laurels or anything else. His mother — Helen Scott, 88, who still lives in her modest home in Houston — called Friday morning with a simple message, he said: “Don’t get too big for your britches.”

He vowed to keep up the tireless drive to get things done that brought him to this unlikely point in life. Winning a Democratic majority and becoming speaker are not surprises to him, Scott said, because “I planned to win. I expected to win.”

Scott was so sure of the outcome that when the new General Assembly office building opened in Richmond last month, he refused to set foot in the office of minority leader, telling his staff: “I’m going to go into the speaker’s office when we win.”

Scott said the source of his confidence is simple: He’s already hit rock bottom, in prison. Now he has no fear of failure. “As flawed as I am, but also as scarred as I am, but also as strong as I am … the worst thing that ever happened to me would not be losing an election,” he said. “My superpower is being underestimated. You sleep on me if you want to. You’re gonna regret sleeping on me.” (Washington Post).

Abigail Spanberger launches bid for Virginia governor.

31 sec. Video.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a centrist Democrat from Virginia, announced Monday that she will not seek reelection to the House but instead will run for Virginia governor in 2025.

Her campaign launch comes a week after Virginia Democrats retook full control of the General Assembly.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a centrist Democrat from Virginia, announced Monday that she will not seek reelection to the House but instead will run for Virginia governor in 2025.

Spanberger’s decision to leave her congressional seat creates a tough job for Democrats who will have to defend her competitive district to have a shot at retaking the majority. Her bid comes a week after Virginia Democrats retook full control of the General Assembly after two years of diviPOLITICO first reported Spanberger’s intention to run for governor in July. In a campaign video released early Monday, Spanberger said she hopes to lower prescription drug prices, grow the middle class and ease inflation.

“While some politicians in Richmond focus on banning abortion and books, what they’re not doing is helping people,” Spanberger said in the video. “I know how to bring people together and get real things done that improve lives. That’s why I’m running for governor.”

Spanberger, 44, is the first person to jump into the race to succeed Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who is ineligible to run again since the Virginia Constitution prohibits a governor from serving two consecutive terms. POLITICO reported earlier this month that Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney has begun assembling a campaign team and plans to launch his own gubernatorial run by the end of the year.

Spanberger, a former CIA officer and law enforcement officer for the U.S. Postal Service, first won her seat by a narrow margin five years ago. The three-term congresswoman has been a leading moderate voice in the Democratic party on issues from fiscal reform to police funding.

She also brings her skill as an immense fundraiser to the table, and could bring a network of national donors to the race. In the 2022 cycle, she raised upward of $9 million.

“Even in this moment of deep division, we can seize the opportunity. I am running to serve all Virginians in every community across our Commonwealth because it’s about time we do what’s right for everyone,” Spanberger said in the video. (Politico)

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The Supreme Court bows to pressure and issues a Code of Conduct signed by all 9 Justices.

Read the Supreme Court’s Ethics Rules👇

Nov. 13, 2023

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it had issued an ethics code for the justices after a series of revelations about undisclosed property deals and gifts intensified pressure on the court to adopt one. Here are the ethics rules. 15 pages long. 👇

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/72bcac445939a03c/58365412-full.pdf

Touch 👇 to watch Senator Whitehouse, long-time critic of SCOTUS ethics, respond to the new code.

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Israel - Hamas Update.

Could the Hamas attack been worse for Israel? and the World?

Evidence gleaned since Oct. 7 shows Hamas militants prepared for a ‘second phase’ of assaults amid hopes of inspiring violence in the West Bank and beyond.

Hamas envisioned deeper attacks, aiming to provoke an Israeli war.

A Palestinian fighter from the armed wing of Hamas takes part in a military parade to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, July 19, 2023.

TEL AVIV — The first clues came from the bodies of slain militants: maps, drawings, notes, and the weapons and gear they carried.


In Beeri, a kibbutz town overrun by Hamas on Oct. 7, one dead fighter had a notebook with hand-scrawled Quranic verses and orders that read, simply, “Kill as many people and take as many hostages as possible.”

Others were equipped with gas canisters, handcuffs and thermobaric grenades designed to instantly turn houses into infernos.
Each was like a piece from a grisly puzzle, a snippet of fine detail from an operation that called for hundreds of discrete crimes in specific locations. Five weeks later, the reassembled fragments are beginning to reveal the contours of Hamas’s broader plan, one that analysts say was intended not just to kill and capture Israelis, but to spark a conflagration that would sweep the region and lead to a wider conflict.

The evidence, described by more than a dozen current and former intelligence and security officials from four Western and Middle Eastern countries, reveals an intention by Hamas planners to strike a blow of historic proportions, in the expectation that the group’s actions would compel an overwhelming Israeli response. Several officials who had not previously spoken about the matter said the intelligence about Hamas’s motivations has become stronger in recent days.

Palestinians break into the Israeli side of the Gaza border fence after gunmen infiltrated areas of southern Israel on Oct. 7.

The findings also shed new light on the tactics and methods used by Hamas to deceive Israel’s vaunted intelligence establishment and thwart initial efforts by the Israel Defense Forces to stop the attack. After breaching the Israeli border in some 30 places, Hamas militants staged a mass slaughter of soldiers and civilians in at least 22 Israeli villages, towns and military outposts and then drew Israeli defenders into gun battles that continued for more than a day.


New evidence suggests that they were prepared to go even further. Some militants carried enough food, ammunition and equipment to last several days, officials said, and bore instructions to continue deeper into Israel if the first wave of attacks succeeded, potentially striking larger Israeli cities.

The assault teams managed to penetrate as far as Ofakim, an Israeli town about 15 miles from the Gaza Strip and about half the distance between the enclave and the West Bank. One unit carried reconnaissance information and maps suggesting an intention to continue the assault up to the border of the West Bank, according to two senior Middle Eastern intelligence officials and one former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of the evidence. Hamas had been increasing its outreach to West Bank militants in recent months, although the group says it did not notify its West Bank allies of its Oct. 7 plans in advance.


“If that had occurred, it would have been a huge propaganda win — a symbolic blow not only against Israel, but also against the Palestinian Authority,” the government that exercises partial control in the West Bank, said the former U.S. official who was briefed on evidence collected since the Oct. 7 attack. The former official, like several others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss preliminary intelligence findings.

Vehicles were burning in Sderot, Israel, following an attack by Hamas.

As it happened, even Hamas was surprised by the sweeping nature of its incursion on Oct. 7, according to the group’s public statements as well as assessments shared privately with journalists. But Hamas leaders expected that their assault would yield more than just hostages, current and former intelligence officials said.

A Hamas official, Basem Naim, asserted in an interview Friday that the group planned in advance for a severe Israeli retaliation. He cited recent events, such as Jewish settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and the storming of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque by settlers, as fueling Palestinian rage.


“We knew there was going to be a violent reaction,” Naim said. “But we didn’t choose this road while having other options. We have no options.”

Hamas militants transport a kidnapped Israeli, center, from the Kfar Azza kibbutz into the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7.

Hamas meticulously planned and prepared for a massacre of Israeli civilians on a scale that was highly likely to provoke Israel’s government into sending troops into Gaza, analysts said. Indeed, Hamas leaders have publicly expressed a willingness to accept heavy losses — potentially including the deaths of many Gazan civilians living under Hamas rule.


“Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it,” Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas politburo, told Beirut’s LCBI television in an interview aired on Oct. 24. “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”


Hamas was willing to accept such sacrifices as the price for kick-starting a new wave of violent Palestinian resistance in the region and scuttling efforts at normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states, according to current and former intelligence officials and counterterrorism experts.
“They were very clear-eyed as to what would happen to Gaza on the day after,” said a senior Israeli military official with access to sensitive intelligence, including interrogations with Hamas fighters and intercepted communications. “They wanted to buy their place in history — a place in the history of jihad — at the expense of the lives of many people in Gaza.”

Secret planning, high-level deception
The planning for the historic assault against Israel was underway for well more than a year before the events of Oct. 7, intelligence officials say. Hamas officials took pains to conceal the preparations, even as senior leaders dropped occasional hints about their intentions.


Throughout the Gaza Strip — the densely populated, heavily surveilled seaside enclave roughly the size of Philadelphia — Hamas conducted above- and below-ground military exercises. Hamas fighters trained with imported AK-47 rifles, handguns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and thermobaric projectiles that generate powerful pressure waves and intense fires with temperatures exceeding 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.

As they trained, they carefully scrutinized population centers and military bases to create a matrix of potential targets, Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials said.


To obtain detailed intelligence, Hamas deployed cheap surveillance drones to generate maps of the Israeli towns and military installations within a few miles of the $1 billion barrier system that Israel built to wall off Gaza. The group elicited additional information, intelligence officials said, from Gazan day laborers who were permitted to enter Israel for work, often in the same farming communities that were in Hamas’s crosshairs. It even monitored Israeli websites, studying real estate photographs and social media postings depicting life inside kibbutzim and the layouts of buildings and houses.


The intelligence gathering was not particularly sophisticated, but it was methodical, said Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism official and founder of the Soufan Group, a private New York security consultancy that works closely with Middle Eastern governments.


“If you’re in prison, you study the prison security system. That is what Hamas has been doing for 16 years,” Soufan said. “Their on-the-ground intelligence was way better than anything the Iranians could have given them.”
The precise plans for how and where the Hamas shock troops would attack were restricted to a tiny circle of elite military planners, amid what Western officials described as professional-grade operational security. The most crucial details appear to have been withheld even from Hamas’s political leadership and the group’s chief backers, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Lebanese-based Hezbollah militant group, as officials from both organizations have publicly acknowledged.


Hamas leaders Yehiya Sinwar, holding his son, and Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza City in 2017.

Planting the seeds
As the plotting progressed in secret, others in the Hamas leadership were busy planting seeds for an extraordinarily sophisticated deception.


The plan’s top architect, Israel believes, was Yehiya Sinwar, Hamas’s military leader. Formerly a Hamas detainee who spent two decades in Israeli prisons, Sinwar is fluent in Hebrew and a self-avowed student of Israeli political culture and news media. Armed with an unusually deep understanding of prevailing political currents in Israel, he and other Hamas leaders began issuing subtle signals in recent years hinting of a new pragmatism.

It was a message that Israelis wanted to hear — that “Hamas wants no more wars,” said Michael Milshtein, the former chief of Palestinian affairs in Aman, Israel’s military intelligence directorate. Milshtein, who briefly met Sinwar years ago, said that Oct. 7 bore an essential hallmark of Sinwar’s previous operations: a “knowledge of the basic consciousness of the Israeli public.”

To buttress that perception of moderation, clashes between Hamas and Israel ceased after 2021. The group notably refrained from jumping in on several occasions when its Gaza ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, fired rockets or engaged militarily with Israel. To many in Israel, it was further evidence that Hamas had changed and no longer sought a bloody conflict. Some reports suggested that Hamas officials even passed along intelligence about PIJ to the Israelis to reinforce the impression that they were being cooperative.

That’s not to say that Sinwar and other Hamas leaders did not occasionally call for Israel’s annihilation. In a 2022 speech, Sinwar warned Israelis that Hamas would one day “march through your walls to uproot your regime.” Yet he and other leaders also professed an overarching commitment to building up the enclave’s infrastructure and improving the economic situation for its 2 million residents.

Since 2020, the European Union and other international donors have contributed to dozens of new projects, from schools and youth sports facilities to roads and sewage treatment plants.


In quiet support of Gaza’s economic development, Israel agreed to grant work permits to up to 20,000 Gazan laborers. Meanwhile, it allowed Qatar to deliver $30 million monthly in development funds, first in the form of enormous suitcases brimming with cash, then through Gazan retail stores, said Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israel’s defense intelligence and the president of Mind Israel, a consultant group for Israeli politicians and security agencies.


The relative calm on Israel’s southwestern border was welcome, as Israeli officials were preoccupied with problems elsewhere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was threatened by historic domestic unrest, including unprecedented waves of demonstrations against his far-right administration’s proposed judicial overhaul. Israel’s military perceived a far greater security threat from Hezbollah in the north and from violent Palestinian groups engaged in escalating clashes with Israeli soldiers and armed settlers in the West Bank.

Captured Hamas weapons, including hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades, are displayed during a news conference for foreign media at a military base in southern Israel on Oct. 20.

The concerns about the West Bank intensified over the summer with the discovery of new attempts by outside groups to arm and incite Palestinians to violence. Officials in Jordan intercepted several shipments of small arms and explosives in the past year that had been smuggled into the country, intended for recipients in the West Bank, according to two Middle Eastern intelligence officials with detailed knowledge of the events.

The contraband, transported in some cases by modified drones but also by truck, included assault rifles, pistols and silencers, Claymore-style antipersonnel mines and C-4 military explosives, the officials said.

The ultimate supplier of the weapons was unclear, but analysts said the goods crossed into Jordan with the aid of Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq, two countries that share a border with the kingdom. How many weapons successfully reached the West Bank is unknown, they said. At least some of the drones were equipped with anti-jamming equipment that made it difficult to force the aircraft down, one of the officials said.

“This was not one network but multiple networks,” the official said. “Many of the attempts were foiled, and people were arrested. It was clear they were trying to use the same routes and methods as drug traffickers.”

Israeli soldiers stand guard on a watchtower in a community along the Israel-Gaza border in 2018.

Caught off-guard

The distractions and ruses worked. In Gaza, less than 50 miles from the West Bank, the arming and training of Hamas assault teams was largely ignored or dismissed.

Surveillance footage and other data continued to flow to Israeli listening posts. But the most important communication was occurring on channels that Israelis either could not access or failed to comprehend, current and former officials said.

“They were conning Israel on a strategic level, using handheld radios, land-wire networks in the tunnels and other comms that we couldn’t listen to, while using codes on the so-called open networks, which they knew we were listening to,” said Eran Etzion, former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council. “They were creating an alternative reality.”

Yadlin, the former head of defense intelligence, said Israel ultimately “allowed a Palestinian army to be built by Hamas and kept telling itself that Hamas could be deterred.”

“Israel,” Yadlin said, “had been deceived.”

Naim, the Hamas official, said the group’s unwavering position on reclaiming all former Palestinian lands should have made its intentions clear. Hamas acted out of a conviction that “we are being erased — our cause is being erased.”

“We warned, we said something is coming, we said, don’t bet on the Palestinians’ silence,” Naim said. “No one listened. This operation, we consider it an act of defense. I am besieged in a prison; I tried to break out of the prison.”

A family photograph of a bar mitzvah on a refrigerator riddled with bullet holes in a family’s home in Kibbutz Kissufim, Israel, on Oct. 18. Hamas militants attacked the kibbutz on Oct. 7, killing at least eight civilians and six Thai laborers while at least four people were abducted and taken to Gaza.

Clues from a massacre

In the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 7, all was finally in readiness.

Amid an unprecedented early-morning barrage of at least 3,000 rockets, leaders issued orders to thousands of men to infiltrate the border by land, air or sea. In a sequence that has been amply documented, they used drones to blind border sensors and automated machine gun posts and used explosives and bulldozers to blast holes in Israel’s perimeter wall.

They punched through in some 30 places along the border and were overrunning military bases and the nearest towns within minutes. In what is now regarded as the deadliest and most brutal attack in Israeli history, they shot, bombed and burned their way through 22 Israeli towns, killing and sometimes torturing about 1,200 people and taking captive about 240 more, according to the Israeli government.

Some of most brutal attacks occurred in Beeri, where militants cut open the belly of a pregnant woman and dragged her fetus onto the ground. In other towns, survivors told of parents being murdered in front of their children and children murdered in front of their parents. Other survivors described witnessing sexual assaults, including rape.

Hamad, the Hamas politburo member, said in the televised interview that there were “complications on the ground” during the assault, some of them caused by non-Hamas Palestinians who joined the raid.

Despite a slow but fierce counterattack by Israelis, many of the assaulting forces, including a number of commanders, managed to return to Gaza, hauling their unexpectedly large numbers of captives in cars, on motorcycles and even in stolen golf carts. About 1,500 Hamas militants were killed by Israelis, and their bodies, phones and weapons were exploited as an intelligence bonanza. Additional insights came from a handful of men who were captured alive and interrogated.

Weapons belonging to Hamas militants lie on the ground at the Kfar Azza kibbutz in southern Israel on Oct. 15.

Weapons belonging to Hamas militants lie on the ground at the Kfar Azza kibbutz in southern Israel on Oct. 15. (Abir Sultan/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

The findings confirmed the thoroughness of Hamas’s intelligence-gathering efforts before the attacks. Some dead fighters had carried high-resolution maps, estimated to have been produced by drones as close as 150 feet above the ground, presumably in the summer, judging from the dryness of the vegetation in the images.

One assault team had been furnished with satellite-based maps, with markings showing the routes from Gaza’s Shejaiya district to the nearest breach spot in the fence, named “Malakeh Crossing.” The maps highlighted the group’s intended entrance, through two points — the front and the back entrance of a kibbutz. Sites designated “Ambush 1” and “Ambush 2,” noted on the surrounding main roads, indicated places where militants would create barriers and traps to block any rescue attempts.

Still another unit carried extensive lists of Israeli weapons and ammunitions to be found and looted in Alumim, a kibbutz that the militants failed to breach, referred to as “Mission 502” in documents.

Along with maps and other documents, many dead fighters were outfitted with handcuffs and gas canisters, as well as instructions to torch homes. The tactic aimed to smoke residents out of their safe rooms, said witnesses and first responders who arrived at the scene.

Even more alarming to some analysts was the evidence of preparation for an extended attack. Hamas officials said they were surprised by their sweeping advances on Oct. 7 and were not prepared for deeper incursions into Israel, or possibly to the West Bank. Yet multiday supplies of food and gear were found amid the bodies of several assault teams, including the units that reached Ofakim and the nearby Urim military base, which serves as a command center for 8200, an elite Israeli intelligence unit.

“They planned a second phase, including in major Israeli cities and military bases,” said a senior Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence.

Iranian demonstrators watch Lebanon's Hezbollah leader, Hasan Nasrallah, during a pro-Palestinian rally in Tehran on Nov. 3. In his first public speech since the war began, Nasrallah said his group had “entered the battle” with unprecedented cross-border fighting.

A perceived symbolic win

Whether the attackers held realistic expectations of progressing as far as the West Bank is unclear. Hamas officials said they had hoped to gain hostages to exchange for prisoners held in Israel and did not anticipate that nearly all the assault teams on Oct. 7 would reach their initial targets.

However, Hamas officials have said repeatedly that they did expect — and welcomed — an extensive Israeli retaliation. Spokesman Ali Barakeh, reached by phone in Lebanon as the Israeli ground campaign was beginning, said Hamas had prepared itself for Israeli bombs and believed it could also repel an IDF ground assault from defensive positions linked by a latticework of tunnels.

“They can thwart it,” Barakeh said of Hamas’s forces. Referring to Israeli ground operations, he said: “Land is easier for us. Let them come attack by land. We are ready.”

Since the start of the ground incursion, other Hamas leaders have publicly exulted about what they perceive to be a strategic victory over Israel. Hamad declared in the Lebanese interview that Hamas was prepared to carry out the same kind of attack against Israel “again and again.”

“There will be a second, a third, a fourth” attack, Hamad said, according to a translation of his remarks by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington nonprofit.

Hamas’s pronouncements welcoming a broader conflict evoke statements by al-Qaeda leaders in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, noted Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization that studies the ideology and online communications of extremist groups. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden expected a furious American response after the attacks on New York and Washington, Katz said, and he welcomed what he believed would be a violent, global confrontation between the Muslim world and the West, with Islam ultimately prevailing.

“Hamas knew Israel would strike back hard. That was the point,” Katz said. “To Hamas, Palestinian suffering is a critical component in bringing about the instability and global outrage it seeks to exploit.”

Palestinians mourn a man killed in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis last month.

Even if its current leadership is effectively destroyed, she said, Hamas and its followers will continue to regard Oct. 7 as a victory. That’s partly because the group unquestionably succeeded in focusing the world’s attention on the Palestinian conflict, she said.

“It’s the first time I can remember that Hamas has become so prominent on a global scale,” Katz said.

“So many people have already forgotten Oct. 7 because Hamas immediately changed the discussion. It put the focus on Israel, not themselves. And that’s exactly what they wanted.”

(The Washington Post).

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Turkey in the news, and it is not yet Thanksgiving.

Poster of a Hamas leader on city walls in Turkey.

FBI investigating whether Turkish government benefited from Adams' 2021 mayoral campaign: sources.

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Federal authorities are looking into whether the Turkish government benefited from donations to Eric Adams' 2021 mayoral campaign, sources say.

According to sources familiar with the case, then candidate Adams was asked by Turkish officials in September 2021 for help keeping the opening of the Turkevi Center, the 35-story new home of the Turkish Consulate on the East Side, on schedule. At that point, Adams had won the Democratic primary but was not yet elected mayor.

The building was said to be waiting for a temporary certificate of occupancy from the fire department, ahead of its scheduled grand opening later that month.

In a statement Sunday, Adams chalked this up to constituent services.

"As a Borough President, part of my routine role was to notify government agencies of issues on behalf of constituents and constituencies. I have not been accused of wrongdoing and I will continue to cooperate with investigators," the mayor's statement said.

According to sources, Adams received a text from a Turkish government official asking if he knew then-FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro. They say Adams reached out to Nigro on the matter, but it is not immediately clear whether he requested or directed him to do anything.

It is then said that Nigro texted back that the building would receive the required approval in time for a Sept. 20 opening. Turkish President Erdogan, in town for the United Nations General Assembly, presided.

In a statement, City Hall Chief Counsel Lisa Zornberg said the mayor and the team are continuing to cooperate with investigators.

"We hope that investigators will continue to cooperate with us and reprimand any federal officer who has improperly leaked details about this investigation as such conduct could prejudice the public and undermines the integrity of our law enforcement process," the statement said.

This all comes after FBI agents seized the mayor's electronic devices, including two phones and an iPad, following an event last Monday night, apparently to retrieve the Sept. 2021 text message exchanges. (ABC 7 NY).
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Marches. Marches. Marches.

Over the weekend, this 👇 happened in France.

More than 100,000 people march in Paris against antisemitism | AP News

More than 180,000 people across France, including 100,000 in Paris, have marched peacefully to protest against rising antisemitism in the wake of Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza.

But around the world, there were many pro Palestine marches, including a March of 300,000 in London.

Today, there will be a March in DC.

Up to 100,000 people are expected.

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