To my friends with an audience:

I implore you please to speak out against the cruelly biased coverage provided of our Hearst papers of the coverage of the war in Israel. Israel faces new calls for truce after shooting, hostages killed, December 18, AP/Hearst.

This is a war for the heart of our civilization, as all wars seem to be. Please tell me why stringers in Deir al-Balah are reporting on a funeral in Shefayim, in the heart of Israel.

Of course Israel faces calls for a cease-fire. Where is the analysis as to what that means? Hamas (widely supported both in Gaza and the areas under Palestinian Authority control) has not indicated it has a desire to make peace. Instead the calls go out for another October 7, and as many more as are necessary to clear the Jews out of Israel. This includes all the mourners pictured at the funeral for hostage Alon Shamriz.

Where is the coverage that Hamas booby traps dolls with recordings of crying babies to lure Jewish soldiers to their deaths? Or intentionally sent out a four year old girl to gather intelligence on Israeli soldiers? Where is the coverage about the amount of arms found in the “residences” of Shajaiya? Or that Hamas fires on Arabs who try to take of the “aid” provided by the West?

Who might benefit from another cease-fire?

There is no possibility of peaceful coexistence with an enemy that wants to destroy you. And this enemy is as intent on destroying the West as Japan was. We opened no humanitarian corridor there. Nor do we supply food, water and electricity to the innocent Russians victims of the war in Ukraine. We brought the Japanese and the Germans to their knees, and dictated how the world would be.

Realignment and movement of populations is nothing new. We don't see the Christian world lining up to retake Bethlehem. We don't see Germans in refuge camps waiting to be returned to Danzig.

So why is it that we tolerate the Palestinians' and their apologists' cries to cleanse Israel of Jews?

We who hold life sacred must understand that our enemies do not. We must not overlook the language of the enemy. Last Wednesday, the AP/Hearst reported from Rafah a mother who said “My twin girls, Maria and Joud, were martyred, and my little son, Ammar, also martyred,” Israel strikes across Gaza Strip as the offensive leaves it isolated, December 13. They were not “senselessly killed” or “tragically taken.” They were martyred. They died for a cause, presumably justified. Hamas would tolerate a million more such deaths if it would destroy the Jews, if it would enrage the ignorant streets of the West, if it would destabilize the peace and order that we once thought we could trust.

Change does not come slowly. It comes in a devouring fire. When we fail to stand up for what is true, we will be burned, whether in ovens, whether in the crucible of attacks on misinformation and free speech, whether in the assault on religion and the foundational ideas of America and the West.