Israel cannot trust Hamas in a cease-fire because it only gives them "an opportunity to regroup, rearm, and commit new atrocities against civilians," Rabbi Yaakov Menken told Newsmax on Monday.
In an interview on "Wake Up America," Menken, the managing director of Coalition for Jewish Values, an organization that represents more than 2,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis in American public policy, said, "People don't realize that Hamas has quite a long history of cease-fires."
"Every single time to them, a cease-fire means an opportunity to regroup, rearm, and commit new atrocities against civilians," he said. "And they've declared quite openly that if given the opportunity, that's exactly what they will do."
According to Menken, the deadly Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was "quote-unquote, just a dress rehearsal for the real massacre of the Jews to come."
"No Jew is safe in Israel because of their ethnicity, because of their people, until Hamas is obliterated. So calling for a quote-unquote cease-fire is calling for more Jews to die."
Menken also railed at anti-Israel protests "going on in universities across America."
"This idea is that even on campus, to disturb a speaker, to stop a speaker from speaking, is somehow an exercise in free speech — no, it is the deliberate quelling of free speech, and the sooner university presidents get a grip on that reality, the sooner we will actually start seeing a change in American education for the better."
Pointing to a protest in Berkeley, Calif., where an elderly Holocaust survivor was heckled — and one in St. Patrick's Cathedral on Easter Sunday — Menken described such disruptions as a "deliberate quelling of free speech."
"It doesn't matter what kind of protest, there's a expectation of basic decorum in a civilized society," he said.
Menken lamented "the loudest voices are winning" on the issue of Israel's war against Hamas right now.
"Go back to the Sturmabteilung — the Brown Shirts — this was their job, to disturb opposition and, specifically, Jewish events to prevent opposition from being heard," he warned.
"They hold nothing holy," he asserted.
"They hold your opinion — you don't have a right to your opinion," he added. "What they want to talk about is more important than what you believe in education. You got to stop funding those universities."
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Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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