Medved to Hamas: ‘What are you trying to achieve other than killing Jews?’
Oct 9, 2023, 1:19 PM | Updated: 2:48 pm
People attending a vigil outside Downing Street, central London, for victims and hostages of Hamas attacks, organised by The Board of Deputies of British Jews, as the death toll rises amid ongoing violence in Israel and Gaza following the attack by Hamas. Picture date: Monday October 9, 2023. (Photo by Lucy North/PA Images via Getty Images)
(Photo by Lucy North/PA Images via Getty Images)
KTTH and nationally syndicated host Michael Medved said Monday he can’t see what the Palestinian militant group Hamas is trying to achieve “other than killing Jews.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally declared war on Hamas on Sunday following the Hamas attack Saturday that killed more than 700 Israelis. Israeli reprisals have killed more than 400 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
“This is the biggest slaughter of Jews just for being Jews since the Holocaust,” Medved declared on The Gee & Ursula Show.
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Medved believes that to Israel, this is worse than 9/11 was to the U.S.
“It’s so much worse, even than 9/11, because with 9/11, if you weren’t in New York or working at the Pentagon, it was distant,” Medved explained. “But everything’s close in Israel. And it’s a country, a total population of about nine million people.”
Medved explained he was not watching media at the time of the initial attacks because of the Jewish holidays, but it didn’t take him long to find out what was going on.
“So, in synagogue, people were talking about it. And the reaction initially was, well, here we go again,” Medved said. “But this is profoundly different.”
During the initial attacks, Hamas was rounding up hostages to bring back to Gaza. A spin-off of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s, the Islamist militant group Hamas took over the Gaza Strip after defeating its rival political party, Fatah, in elections in 2006.
Medved stated his brother has lived in Jerusalem for almost 40 years, and people his children’s age have been called up in the Israeli army because some have experience as officers in the army.
“They’re calling up 300,000 reservists, which means that the effort to rescue the hostages, which is a very, very big focus, and to rid the world, and the Middle East, particularly of Hamas once and for all, which is an evil terrorist group,” Medved addded.
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It’s hard to figure out the timing of the Hamas attack, Medved pondered, other than it was the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
That war took place Oct. 6-25, 1973. It was fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria. The war began when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 6, 1973.
That led to a dramatic improvement in Israeli intelligence. Medved was surprised that Israel wasn’t more well prepared for Saturday’s attack.
“We’ve heard so much about the Iron Dome and Israeli intelligence, which has stopped many other potential attacks,” Medved explained. “And there will be a multitude of investigations.”
The United Nations recognizes Palestine as a nation. The U.S. does not, and America has been taking note of Iran’s role in the most recent incident.
“Iran is the main supporter of Hamas as it has always been, despite the fact that Hamas is not Shiite,” Medved said. “We are sending over the Gerald Ford, which is an aircraft carrier and its aircraft battle group, I think there are four destroyers coming along with it. And that has to be a guarantee that Iran will not become directly involved.”
“But this horror in southern Israel right now is exactly why people are so concerned about Iran developing nuclear weapons,” Medved continued. “If Iran develops nuclear weapons, then Hezbollah and Hamas and other murderous death cults would be given access to them.”
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Medved explained that Israel started out as a third-world nation but has grown considerably since then.
“Now it has a per capita income of higher than Great Britain than as higher than the European Union,” he said. “There was a lot of optimism in Israel about this peace deal that the Biden administration has been pushing involving Saudi Arabia, and the United States would be basically doing a pact with Saudi Arabia in return for which Saudi Arabia and Israel would have mutual recognition.”
Gee Scott and Ursula Reutin host The Gee & Ursula Show weekdays from 9 a.m.-noon on KIRO Newsradio.
