Iconoclast: Hamas’ Defenders Show True Selves

Hamas’ “horrific videos” of its brutal attacks on civilians should “be enough to shake the world awake,” writes The Free Press’ Bari Weiss, yet: “People are rejoicing in the slaughter on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York,” and “at the Sydney Opera House cheering ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘death to the Jews.’ ” The campus “social justice crowd offers explanations for the massacre — a massacre that, in part, targeted a group of progressive Israelis at a music festival.” So: “Now we know whose politics are rooted not in conservatism or liberalism or anything else other than simply hating Jews.”

Hillary watch: More Deranged Than Ever

“Perhaps the political masterminds who advise her are responsible for the guff” Hillary Clinton is now spouting, scoffs Jenny Holland at Spiked — namely that “there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members,” i.e. Trump voters. Worse: “she might actually believe it.” “Since her loss to Trump, Clinton and the liberal establishment she represents have become more and more deranged.” “The more hysterical and despotic they become, the saner Trump looks by comparison.” Not least because they “ignore the increasingly urgent problems that the American people are facing — from a crisis at the border to attacks on parental rights to a devastating drug epidemic that has killed over 100,000 Americans.” “Right now, Clinton increasingly sounds like an older, more dour Marie Antoinette.”

Libertarian: Performing Charity Is a Right

Houston “police have repeatedly cited [Food Not Bombs] activists for distributing free food outside the city’s downtown public library,” and city officials “have vowed to keep issuing citations until the activists stop,” reports Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella of a nationwide “ongoing tug-of-war that pits public order against the First Amendment right to perform charity as a form of expression.” A Santa Ana, Calif., church “is suing the city . . . for refusing to let it distribute food and threatening it with citations,” arguing that “feeding the needy is intrinsic to the practice of its faith.” “The government has no right to bully good Samaritans,” and “the religious duty to perform acts of charity” — or “the simple human duty to look after one another” — make such “laws look awfully small in comparison.”

From the right: Did Mayorkas Admit Perjury?

Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas “might have just admitted to repeatedly lying to Congress under oath,” charge Issues & Insights’ editors. He just waived “more than two dozen federal statutes so that construction could begin on 20 miles of border wall.” “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers . . . to prevent unlawful entries,” he wrote, justifying his action. “That sort of language,” I&I’s editors observe, “would suggest an immediate crisis,” yet for years, Mayorkas has “repeatedly testified” — “under oath to Congress” — “that the border is secure.” “With his latest order, did Mayorkas just confess to lying to Congress on multiple occasions” — in violation of the law? “Maybe the FBI could look into it.”

Conservative: Hamas Suddenly Divides the Left

“The sheer depravity of Hamas’s attack on Israel, during which its terrorists murdered close to 1,000 people and beheaded babies, is causing acute discomfort and splits in America’s Left,” notes the Washington Examiner’s Hugo Gurdon, with “a range of responses ranging from total support for the killers to utter disgust, with contemptible mush in the middle.” Horror at the atrocities is in conflict with the left’s usual support for Hamas “precisely because the terror group detests and seeks to destroy Israel.” Indeed, “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fits neatly into the Left’s Manichean moral order, in which backward nations of the ‘global South’ are to be excused and supported because their miserable conditions are allegedly due not to failings of their own but to predation by successful developed democracies.” The left’s “problem today is that Hamas’s outrages have helped expose [that ideology] as a colossal lie.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board