The Truth About Israel and the Truth About Hamas

A recent Wall Street Journal weekly ‘Review and Outlook’ editorial was “The Truth About Hamas.” It kept me awake, and our news media must no longer cover it up.

May 27, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

About the above image: “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” is an 1866 etching by Gustave Doré. It depicts a scene from the Book of Genesis (32:24-30). The Angel contends with Jacob’s strength, but the Angel is unmovable. In the end, the Angel gives Jacob a new name: “Isra-El,” a name which means “One who wrestles with God.”

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Sometime ago at Beyond These Stone Walls, we introduced the practice of publishing an occasional post from a voice other than my own. We created a platform for those posts called “Voices from Beyond.” To differentiate from my weekly post always published on Wednesday, we decided this week to separate those other posts by publishing them on Saturday mornings. They will not appear every Saturday, but when we have one worthy of your eyes and attention, it will from hereon always be on Saturday.

There was a time earlier in the life of this blog when few people in the Catholic universe openly wanted to be associated with it. I remember that in our first month of posting in 2009, we had about 40 readers. This month, 17 years later, we are approaching 40,000 just in the month of May.

Also recently, and our publisher has made note of this, we receive a steady stream of writers asking us to let them publish here. I remember the old comedian W.C. Fields famously saying “I would never want to join a club that would have me as a member.” That seems no longer the case at Beyond These Stone Walls.

We recently received a post from an old friend of this blog, Sheryl Collmer, a frequent and noted writer for Crisis magazine. She merely wanted my opinion on her essay, which she had hoped to publish somewhere else. After reading it twice, and pondering it carefully, I asked her to let us publish it at “Voices from Beyond.” She graciously accepted the invitation. I was very pleased because the timing of it was perfect. It fits nicely as a companion to this post today, which at that moment existed only in my mind. Both posts tell a bold truth, one that is widely covered up by the left-leaning political entities that have hijacked our news media to the detriment of democracy.

Sheryl’s oddly titled post is “I <Heart> Israel.” I wondered what our publishing format would do with such a title. I did not like it at first, but then I came to love it, which is exactly the point Sheryl was making. I would have been more straightforward, but that’s just me. In my mind, what Sheryl has written is “The Truth about Israel.” It was posted at “Voices from Beyond” on Saturday, May 23, 2026. We will link to it again at the end of this post. I hope you will read it and share it. Israel has unfairly suffered a bludgeoning by the same left-leaning entities that have distorted our news media and have denied us the truth, not only about Israel, but about Hamas as well. It is no secret that for this very reason, our mainstream news media has itself suffered a credibility bias in many polls. Only a small minority now report having any faith that the news media presents the news fairly and without partisan bias.

Like many of our readers, I grew up listening to, and trusting, Walter Cronkite, who engendered in his listeners a comforting aura of truth and trust. It came as a great shock to me to learn after his death that he was actually politically inclined to be a liberal Democrat. It is a tribute to his integrity as a newscaster that no one could have discerned that. He was fair and unbiased, and that is all we ask.

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The Truth About Hamas

Hamas is neither a nation nor a people. Hamas is a Palestinian group that had grown dramatically in the years leading up to the Hamas assault on Israel on October 7, 2023. Hamas sought to create a single Islamic state in historic Palestine, which until recently has been largely divided between Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hamas in Arabic means “zealot.” Hamas is also an acronym for “Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya,” or “Islamic Resistance Movement.” The group was founded in 1988 as a militant segment of the Palestinian Arab national movement which became gradually radicalized.

Hamas openly seeks Israel’s destruction and this attack has the same impact in Israel that September 11, 2001 had in the United States. Hamas, since 2000, has been designated by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization. Also since 2000, the U.S. Department of State has identified Iran as the most active supporter of Hamas and terrorism. Hamas self-identifies not only as an Israeli resistance movement, but as a mechanism dedicated to the eradication of Israel and, by extension, Jews.

On May 14, 2026, The Wall Street Journal published its weekly “Review and Outlook” editorial. On that day it was titled “The Truth About Hamas.” The Journal has performed a great service to us as consumers of the news. And not only to us. It has also salvaged from the wreckage of widespread media bias the notion that some brave souls in the business of news can present the bold truth to us regardless of how unpopular or discomforting it may be. That one piece by the Journal has blasted open a tightly sealed door cemented shut by a partisan agenda in the news we are allowed to see, hear, and digest. The Journal documented something found in few mainstream media sources: a “Silenced No More,” the report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children.

Fair warning in advance: sometimes the bold truth is unsettling, even infuriating. Sometimes it keeps us awake at night. But this is a truth that all the grownups among us must come to know and witness firsthand before we accept any of the distortions imposed upon us by those who package and present our news. The Report is not easy to read, nor is The Wall Street Journal’s capsulized presentation of it. Here are some alarming excerpts:

• “Reading ‘Silenced No More,’ the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas … we were transported back to October 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.”

• “The new report is a catalogue, for memory’s sake, of Hamas depravity. Testimony from site after site attests to rape and assault. Screams and pleas. Gunshots to the face and genitals. Mutilation. Burning. Bodies naked, legs spread. Grotesque scenes staged. All forming an evidentiary record, the result of more than 10,000 photos and video segments and more than 430 interviews, testimonies and meetings with survivors, witnesses and experts.”

• “ ‘I saw them raping her,’ said Raz Cohen, who escaped the Nova Music Festival where 396 people were slaughtered. ‘Then they murdered her. And then they raped her again.’ ”

• “Eden Wessely, who came to Nova to rescue a friend, found and filmed a naked, burned body. ‘Her dress was pulled up, and she was not wearing underwear, not because it burned, but because there was no trace …. Her legs were spread. Her genitals exposed.’ A review by forensic pathologists confirmed these details.”

• “Yoni Saadon recounts another horror: ‘She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I were dead too …. I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologize to her, saying ‘I’m sorry.’ Later Yoni saw ‘a beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten Hamas beating and raping her.’ The last one shot her in the head.”

• “A male says he was gang-raped at the Nova site … . The Hamas invaders had been given operational materials including Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase lists such as ‘Take off your clothes,’ ‘Lie down’, ‘Spread your legs.’ The planned sexual degradation speaks to years of Palestinian propaganda that treats Jews as subhuman.”

• “Former hostage Ilana Gritzewsky says, ‘One terrorist started touching me; he put his hand under my shirt. That’s when I fainted.’ On waking, she was ‘surrounded by Hamas people, my shirt up here, my pants down here.’ After being freed, she learned that they had broken her pelvis.”

These excerpts from the Journal report on the Civil Commission are only a few of the atrocities committed by Hamas fighters that day, and they are not even the most disturbing ones. The Journal concluded by apologizing to readers whose sensitivities might have been offended by such details: “We regret having to relate such details, but it is crucial to remember when the understandable human impulse is to forget such horrors. All the more so because the sexual violence by Hamas has been aggressively denied by an anti-semitic global left that wants us to forget. Everywhere denial serves the same purpose: to distort Israel’s defensive war as if it were wanton violence. Such deniers prefer anything to reminding the world why Israel has no choice but to fight for its life.”

So ends the Journal editorial of May 14, 2026. This report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas contains evidence and testimony of a caliber that equates or exceeds that of the Nuremberg trials.

I, too, wrote of several graphic atrocities inflicted upon young Thai workers who answered an ad from Israel to perform migrant field work there. The tourism-based economy of Thailand suffered greatly during the Covid pandemic. Many young Thai men sought employment in Israel in order to send money home to support their families, They knew nothing of Hamas and its hatred for Jews. They knew only poverty. Then they became the second largest ethnic group to be murdered and raped, and then held captive by Hamas fighters. I wrote about the atrocities that befell them in “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel.” I, too, apologize to readers for having to read of these atrocities at my blog, but no one else would cover it, except the Bangkok Post. I wanted to be certain that the media distortion that Israel was the aggressor and Hamas was their victim would not find a believer in my pages.

I wrote of Mitchai Sarabon, a young Thai man who faced unemployment in Thailand after his release from the Thai military. As Hamas descended upon the Nova Music Festival to murder and slaughter and rape, Mitchai saved many lives. In the process, he was shot by Hamas in the back, and in the chest, and then again in the head. This very resilient young man somehow survived. Before being shot, he had brought others to safety in a locked kibbutz food pantry. The Hamas fighters were trying to break down the door. It is a testament to the preparations they conducted before launching this assault that their demands to “open the door” were shouted in Thai.”

From his Tel Aviv hospital bed, Mitchai Sarabon, ended his testimony with, “I just want the people of Israel to know that I pray for them every day.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for having the courage to read and face the truth of this post. I once again apologize that you had to read these details here.

I want to also present to you Sheryl Collmer’s brave post published on May 23, 2026 at our “Voices from Beyond” feature. Please read and share Sheryl’s craft, I <Heart> Israel.

You may also wish to read these related posts:

Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel

Iran, by Another Name, Was Once the Savior of Israel

Pope Leo, President Trump and War with Iran

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Trial of Cardinal Becciu, the Betrayal of Cardinal Pell

Credits: Left, CNS; Right, CNS/Paul Haring

In December 2023 Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, the first prelate in history to face trial in a Vatican court, was convicted of embezzlement and money laundering.

January 10, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

I recently explained to a friend concerned about the emergence of accounts of historic abuse by priests that mainstream media often save such stories to run them near Christmas and Easter. The motive of the left-leaning media in this seems obvious. It is to drive a wedge between Catholics and their Church. So it was doubly distressing when lurid stories of criminal behavior were generated from the highest levels of Church authority during the Advent and Christmas seasons this year.

“A Cardinal Once Seen as Future Pope Now Faces Prison.” That shocking headline was a front page story by Francis X. Rocca in the December 13, 2023 edition of The Wall Street Journal. Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints, has stood accused by Vatican investigators of the crimes of embezzlement and money laundering since 2020. Trial for the then 75-year-old prelate commenced in 2021. In the weeks before Christmas in 2023, he was convicted of the charges and sentenced to a prison term of five-and-a-half years.

Cardinal Becciu is the first cardinal in Church history to face criminal charges in a Vatican court. According to the Rocca article, five others also faced criminal charges in the same case. They included other Vatican officials and outsiders. The case centered on a failed Vatican investment in a high-end London property and “the alleged theft of money intended to free a kidnapped nun but reportedly spent instead on resort vacations and luxury goods from Prada and Louis Vuitton,” according to Rocca. This story could not be worse.

The trial, which concluded near Christmas, included “accusations of Vatican vendettas as well as Becciu’s secretly recorded conversation with the pope.” Mr. Rocca reported that Pope Francis changed Church laws during the investigation in ways that defendants’ lawyers said favored the prosecution and violated the right to a fair trial — “including a broader authority to eavesdrop on suspects.”

Prior to his role as prefect for the Vatican office, Cardinal Becciu had been in the official role of “Substitute for General Affairs.” Mr. Rocca described this role as “effectively the pope’s chief of staff.” Becciu served in this capacity for the last two years of the pontificate of Benedict XVI and at least the first five years of the papacy of Francis. Becciu described this role, reported by journalist Francis X. Rocca, in 2018: “The substitute is, so to speak, the one who has no time for himself but must give it first to the Holy Father and therefore be willing to take any of his calls and favor any of his initiatives.”

It was Francis who elevated Becciu to the rank of cardinal and appointed him to his role overseeing the canonization of Saints. When the charges of money laundering and embezzlement emerged in 2020, Pope Francis asked him to resign.

Cardinal Becciu, Pope Francis, Cardinal Pell [Credits: CNS/Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters, CBCEW, Daniel Ibanez/CNA/EWTN]

Who’s Left on the Side of Right?

Several biographies of Pope Francis point to Vatican corruption as a primary impetus for his elevation to the papacy in the conclave of 2013. In my post, “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy,” I described the conditions under which Benedict XVI shocked the world with his decision to step down from the Chair of Peter. His final year was marred by Vatican corruption, especially revolving around Vatican finances. The betrayals and political machinations in Rome became legendary.

The word, “machination” refers to a crafty scheme or cunning design for the accomplishment of a sinister end. There were several such schemes at work in the background that caused Benedict XVI to conclude, as he did in his February 2013 announcement, that he must step down:

“I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

In the years to follow the 2013 conclave, one scandal after another emerged from Rome. Writing for The New York Times in 2018, conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat wrote of the “latest bomb” to go off in “an already cratered Catholic landscape.” The bomb then was an 11-page “testimony” from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States, accusing Pope Francis of shielding and enabling a serial abuser, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, by releasing him from restrictions on his activities and travel.

The restrictions had been imposed by Benedict XVI in the wake of revelations that McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians for years. Cardinal McCarrick had been restricted by Benedict to a life of prayer and penance, but ignored it. According to columnist Robert George writing in The Washington Post in 2018, “Pope Francis ignored it as well.”

Ross Douthat attributed this decision of Francis to the fact that he “needed allies” in the ongoing struggle between conservative and liberal Catholics. This is a scandal of its own. Douthat reported that McCarrick “was sympathetic to the Pope’s planned liberalizing push.” The irony was that liberal Catholics, the very ones who championed full exposure of the sexual abuse crisis, were willing to look the other way when Francis promoted McCarrick, removed his disciplinary sanctions, and corralled his help for an obsessive agenda to thwart Catholic conservatives. Some have suggested that such obsessive concerns helped to keep rogue Vatican actors like Cardinal Becciu from scrutiny. When the spotlight of obsession is on sexual abuse alone, money flows freely in the surrounding darkness.

When Cardinal Pell Was Accused

The case against Cardinal George Pell was also influenced by nefarious machinations, including police and prosecutor corruption. This was at the heart of a curious incident related in Prison Journal (Volume 1, p. 329). At a pretrial hearing on Cardinal Pell’s false sexual abuse charges, among the most difficult charges to defend against, a Melbourne, Australia priest who was present in the court told Pell’s supporters that he prays that the prosecutor will “mess up his presentation.” When that actually happened, the priest reportedly said, “See, my prayers are working!” When Cardinal Pell was told of this he said, “I would have much preferred that he prayed for justice to be done.”

Those were the spontaneous words of an innocent man who believed that justice in this life is possible — even likely. The guilty on the other hand engage in any number of contrived machinations to do an end run around the law. When a defendant is innocent and there is no evidence supporting the charge, it is too often police and prosecutors who resort to machinations to do an end run around the law.

There is a vivid example of this on the same page of Pell’s Prison Journal cited above. Detective Sgt. Kevin Carson of the Ballarat, Australia Police Department produced a report claiming that sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Victoria — where Pell was facing trial — was responsible for forty-three suicides. After the shocking story was leaked to tabloid media, a parliamentary inquiry into the Church’s handling of sexual abuse was launched. An inquiry is similar to a grand jury report in the United States.

The police set up an investigation, but were able to identify only twenty-five of the forty-three named by Detective Carson. Of those twenty-five names, only sixteen had committed suicide. But only one of the sixteen had been assaulted by a member of the clergy. As Pell himself pointed out, “One is one too many, but one is not forty-three.” This tendency to “heighten the hype” lends itself to unfair trials and wrongful convictions, but it also lends itself to career advancement, a shamefully strong force in many of the US grand jury reports on Catholic clergy.

In his analysis of the Cardinal Becciu trial in The Wall Street Journal cited above, Francis X. Rocca included the following paragraph:

“Around that time, Francis made Australian Cardinal George Pell his finance chief and gave him sweeping powers. Pell unveiled new financial guidelines for the Vatican. But he clashed with the secretariat, which opposed his plans for a financial audit by an external auditing firm. Pell considered Becciu his main opponent.... Other Vatican officials also lobbied the Pope against Pell’s changes. The Pope curtailed Pell’s powers and the external audit was canceled. Pell later returned to Australia to face child sex abuse charges. He was acquitted on appeal and died” [on January 10, 2023].

In an October 15, 2023 published commentary on Mr. Rocca’s account in The Wall Street Journal, I added some further context to the story:

“The part of this nebulous story that most troubles me is the decision of the Pope to listen to Cardinal Becciu and other Vatican officials who lobbied against Cardinal George Pell’s financial reforms even after [ the Pope] had empowered him to reform Vatican finances. Mr. Rocca does not speculate on the source of charges against Cardinal Pell in Australia — charges for which he was exonerated in a unanimous decision of Australia’s High Court. This was after he wrongly spent 400 days in prison. There are many who believe that there may have been a connection between these false charges and Cardinal Pell’s attempted reforms of Vatican finances. Pell himself suspected this.”

Book cover image courtesy of Ignatius Press; Red cardinal photo by RachidH (CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)

Many Unanswered Questions

In Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal Volume 2, in an entry dated 2 August 2018, he devoted several pages to an article of mine, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” The article had been sent to him in prison by Sheryl Collmer, a columnist for Crisis magazine. (The full excerpt now appears at our “Voices from Beyond” feature. )

My article drew a parallel between an accuser’s testimony in the trial of Cardinal Pell and that of another accuser in an unrelated case reported in Rolling Stone magazine by a now disgraced reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. It turned out that there was indeed a connection, and the Erdely article was widely read in Australia before Pell was accused. As Francis X. Rocca observed in The Wall Street Journal excerpt above, “Pell considered Becciu his main opponent.” Is there something further to be deduced from this? Consider this 2020 entry from the Australia site Wrongful Convictions Report — “Cardinal Pell ... well, well, well”:

“Italian media have reported that Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, 72, is suspected of wiring 700,000 euros to recipients in Australia who helped to ensure hostile testimony in the trial of Cardinal George Pell, who was accused of molesting choir boys in Melbourne in the 1990s. Becciu, days after being sacked by the Pope, denies the truth of the reports.”

Consider also these further entries in Cardinal Pell’s Journal written from his prison cell:

• Friday, 2 August 2019: “The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019. No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations was also a fantasy or a fiction. I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause.”

• Sunday, 27 October 2019: “I finished reading a collection of articles from 23 October 2019 on the Vatican finance scandals ... [One] article mentioned Msgr Cesare Burgazzi, who worked in the Vatican Secretariat of State on the finances who became disillusioned by his discovery of a parallel bank, another IOR, and was then removed from his position through media accusations of sexual behavior which were later shown to be completely baseless. I had not heard of this.” [Emphasis added].

• Thursday, 14 November 2019: “So far, the Vatican financial scandals have not bitten as deeply, especially in Australia, but they are a scandal of incompetence exploited by criminals.... Becciu had given an interview to a journalist as he was under pressure, which is not surprising.”

• Thursday, 28 November 2019: “Cardinal Becciu furiously denounced as ‘another false article’ Ed Condon’s accurate account on the London property fiasco and of the accounting procedures which attempted to conceal it.” [Footnote: Ed Condon, “Vatican Officials: Swiss Bank Suspected of Money Laundering led to Pell Conflict,” Catholic World Report, 21 November 2019.]

• Saturday, 30 November 2019: “I am becoming more interested in trying to put together the early stages in the evolution of the charges against me. Why were the charges first ascribed to 1997 instead of 1996? When was Sunday Mass introduced as a setting for the crime? Who helped the complainant? When did the similarities with the [Rolling Stone’s] Billy Doe incidents in Philadelphia emerge?”

Cardinal Pell’s last question now haunts this story: “Is there a Rome connection?”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: I continue to feel an obligation to the late Cardinal Pell to uncover the truth of this story whenever and wherever possible. Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Excerpt: From the Prison Journal of Cardinal Pell, 2 August 2019

Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's Rolling Stone

The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”