Anti-Semitic Acts against Americans in the United States and Their Implications for the 9/11/ISIS War in the Middle East
The war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level.
“We assess that the actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate several years ago,” Mr. Wray said.
Mr. Wray worried that individuals or small groups in the US were inspired by the 9/11 attacks and would try to carry out attacks against Americans.
He said that it includes home-grown extremists inspired by a foreign terrorist organization, as well as domestic violent extremists targeting Jewish or Muslim communities.
Mr. Wray pointed to an arrest in Houston on Oct. 19 of a Palestinian asylum seeker who had been in the United States since June 2019 on a travel visa that expired a few months later. Mr. Wray said the man, who prosecutors identified as Sohaib Abuayyash, was studying how to build bombs and posted details about his support for killing Jewish people.
According to the criminal complaint, he had been illegally in possession of a gun and had been in contact with others who share a radical mindset, as well as trained with weapons to commit an attack.
Between Oct. 7 and Oct. 23, there were 312 antisemitic acts in the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League. There was a report on Oct. 15 at Grand Central Terminal that a woman was punched in the face because she was Jewish.
The Council on American Islamic Relations said it received more than 700 complaints, including bias incidents, since October 7.
Abidjan, Jordan, and the United States: the Israel-Hamas War and its Implications for State Intelligence, Security, and Security
Al-Qaeda has called for attacks against the US in the wake of Hamas’ assault on Israel, but he said there was no evidence of an imminent threat.
The National Counterterrorism Center’s Christine Abizaid told lawmakers the Israel– Hamas war has been featured in messaging and propaganda.
“We’ve seen it from al-Qaeda affiliates, almost every single one of them,” she said, referring to groups in the Mideastern and Africa. We’ve seen it from the Islamic State, which doesn’t align itself with Hamas, but still uses the current conflict to encourage violence in a way that is exploitative.
“This is not a time for panic, but it is a time for vigilance,” he said. We shouldn’t stop going to schools, houses of worship or any of the other things that we do daily. But we should be vigilant.”
Abizaid said the U.S. has no intelligence that indicates Iran or its proxies, most notably the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, “had any foreknowledge” of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
She said the U.S. wants to target American interests in Iran because of its involvement in the war. She noted that militant groups aligned with Tehran have conducted 24 attacks against American forces in Iraq and Syria.
She said Iran, Hezbollah and their proxies are trying to calibrate their activity while still paying costs in the current conflict.
“This is a very fine line to walk and, in the present regional context, their actions carry the potential for miscalculation thus requiring heightened scrutiny in the region and we monitor for signs that the conflict could spread.”
On the domestic front, she said she has no indications of any Iranian threat inside the U.S., though she cautioned that Iran has a “significant escalatory capability” that it could call on if Tehran decided it wanted to ramp up the conflict.
The First Friday of October 7, 1993: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Light of a Muslim-Israeli Particle Activist
When President Biden landed in Tel Aviv days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of more than 1,400 people, he told an audience of Israelis that this was not just Israel’s Sept. 11, that “it was like 15 9/11s.”
That unfounded perception has remained in the years since. Muslim thought in America was intensified by the arrival of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Islam appeared close to terrorism in the American imagination once again, as masked figures carrying out gruesome executions reinforced twisted stereotypes of Muslims. The potential to become a terrorist for any Muslim teenager who became a Western recruit was the result of the phenomenon of the Western recruit.
The health ministry in Gaza says more than 8000 have been killed since the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and these long-held suspicions have crept into the public debate over showing support for Palestinians. The false connection between supporting civilians in Gaza and the terrorist activities of Hamas is manifesting across our country’s public institutions. From college campuses to places of work, people are facing retribution for expressing support for Palestinians that is being misconstrued as anti-Israel or pro-Hamas. Companies have rescinded job offers, journalists have been fired for sharing posts, and students whose organizations have signed statements have been smeared publicly. The scale of suppression of speech by social media platforms, such as the shadow banning of Gaza-related posts and the blocking of accounts on Instagram, has been alarming enough that Human Rights Watch has started to document it.
The first Friday after Oct. 7, the first holy day for Muslims and Jews since the attacks, New York City and the rest of the country seemed to be on high alert, bracing itself because a former Hamas leader in Qatar had called for protests across Arab nations in support of the Palestinians, a call which was mislabeled as a day of jihad. I was expecting a tense and nervous congregation when I visited the Islamic Center. The women were waiting to pray, and the man finished his speech. As we knelt together, all I could hear was sobs.
His pained voice turned to anger when he recounted encountering disbelief that Hamas committed terrible atrocities when it attacked Israel. Lavi seemed especially bewildered by people “arguing over the semantics” of whether people were beheaded or their heads fell off, or even whether there were hostages in Gaza.
In one particularly gruesome twist, there’s been an uproar over whether Hamas had beheaded babies — an unverified claim that President Biden repeated before the White House walked it back, and has been subject to much discussion since.
The Israeli Bombing of a Gaza Hospital, as Revified by a Palestinian, is False or Exaggerated by the History of Hamas
The Iraq war is just one example of how false or exaggerated claims can be used as a rationale for war.
After the attacks, the United States received deep global sympathy. Even if they disagreed with the U.S. policies, many Muslims around the world were furious about the attacks on Islam. (The idea that Muslims widely celebrated the attacks has been repeatedly shown to be false or traces back to a few instances of dubious clarity.)
The United States chose to wage a reckless and destructive war in Iraq because they wanted to avenge their past mistakes, which included the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration lied in the lead up to the war and the chaos, violence and death that followed the invasion have badly damaged the United States and its allies.
People saw how the quick and thoughtless disbanding of the Iraqi Army led to the creation of Isis a decade later.
To make matters worse, the Israel government has a long history of making false claims and denying responsibility for atrocities that later proved to be its doing.
In one example of many, in 2014, four boys younger than 13 were killed by Israeli airstrikes while playing by themselves at a beach — three of them hit by a second blast while desperately fleeing the initial blast.
Israel then investigated and exonerated itself. Peter Lerner said that it was a pound belonging to the Naval Police of Hamas and used by the militant group.
Some journalists who saw the bombing said there was no attempt to interview them, according to The Telegraph.
The history of the global upheaval over Hamas claims that an Israeli missile hit a hospital courtyard in Gaza shows how history plays out. Israeli and American officials denied this, and asserted that the missile came from within Gaza. The initial claims that 500 people were killed in the hospital blast led to global condemnations. Then the number was challenged, leading to another round of uproar and back-and-forth.
It is certainly possible that the hospital may have been accidentally hit by a missile fired in Gaza — such misfires have happened. But Israel bombardment has also caused large civilian casualties. The evidence is not conclusive or the truth is unknown.
It might seem cruel for a family who lost members in the hospital blast to argue about exact numbers, just as it seems cruel to an Israeli family who suffered during the attack.
But there’s still the fact that fabricating or exaggerating atrocities is done to influence the calculus of what the public will accept — including what costs are justified to impose on civilians.
In 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, there was widespread resistance in the United States to the idea of a new war — the country had not shaken “Vietnam syndrome,” that it was best for the United States to avoid large foreign military entanglements, both for practical and moral reasons.
In 1990 a teenager who was then a child, testified before Congress about seeing Iraqi soldiers take premature babies out of incubators and leave them to die on the floor. The claim was widely repeated by officials and the media, and even by Amnesty International.
The secret was that the witness was the daughter of the ambassador of Kuwait to the US, and that she had lied in order to get her story heard in the case.
The war effort was hampered by the shocking fabrication. It’s not necessary to make sure that oil fields stay with the rulers of a tiny country created by colonial powers in the early 20th century. A better appeal for war is to oppose an army so savage that it commits the most unthinkable crimes.
The terrible outcome of all this history is widespread distrust and dehumanization, as ordinary people’s loss and pain are viewed suspiciously as a potential cudgel that will cause further loss and pain for others.
There are many echoes on social media of this. “Hamas beheaded babies, Saddam had WMD and I’m the last unicorn,” one person posted on X. Another one said, “The ‘40 babies beheaded by Hamas’ lie is equivalent to the WMD’s lie.”
Human Rights Watch verified some of the videos of the horror that happened on October 7, and said the attacks were deliberate killings. The attacks, which included mass summary killings, hostage-taking, and atrocities, were condemned as cruel and brutal by the group. Both organizations have called for the attacks to be investigated as war crimes.
Both organizations also have a history of documenting Israeli wrongdoings, including its treatment of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, and both organizations have been vilified for doing so, especially by the government of Israel and some NGOs and lawmakers.
These are the kind of voices who need to be heard. Many in the region and world already see the United States as reflexively supporting Israel, no matter what, so President Biden might consider elevating such human rights voices instead of embracing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Gaza Strip as a prisoner’s nightmare: a warning to end kidnappings and to protect innocent civilians in a war crime
kidnapping civilians is a war crime and should be ended quickly, according to the organization. And their families shouldn’t have to endure this suspicion on top of their pain.
Equal concern for all victims, including the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, is what it takes to demand war crimes be stopped and lives respected.