Posts Tagged ‘Hamas’

LinkSwarm for October 13, 2023

Friday, October 13th, 2023

Bad news: Still unemployed. Good news: Applied/submitted for lots of jobs.

Good news: My dog’s operation was a success! Bad news: The lump was cancerous. Good news: The cancer was a Stage 1 soft tissue melanoma, which is the lowest level and has little chance of recurrence.

Also: Today is Friday the 13th. Also, a Hamas leader has declared a “Day of Jihad.

Good times, good times.

  • Hunter Biden is the gift that keeps giving. “Hunter Biden Raided Daughter’s College Fund For $20,000 To Buy Hookers And Drugs.”

    At the time, Maisy, now 22, was in her final year of high school. She and her two older sisters, along with Joe Biden and First Lady Jill, had tried to stage an intervention just weeks earlier at the President’s Delaware home to get Hunter to go back to rehab.

    He promised to go, but instead ended up smoking crack in a hotel, he confessed in his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things.

    Emails and messages from his laptop show money he took from Maisy’s educational savings account went in part to paying various suspected prostitutes who visited him at hotels in the following days, his Porsche 911 car loan, sex webcam subscription fees, and other personal expenses.

    Hunter’s assistant Katie Dodge plaintively emailed him on December 28 that year that he had University of Pennsylvania tuition bills of $27,945 due (likely for his eldest daughter, Naomi), a $1,700 payment for his Porsche, $4,244.70 for Maisy’s high school Sidwell Friends, her $3,000 paycheck and $1,000 for another employee.

    Hunter tersely told Dodge to pay for the Porsche and his health insurance, but that she would only be getting half her paycheck – and that he would ‘deal with tuitions when time comes.’

  • Israeli tanks enter Gaza.
  • Following reports of Syria launching missiles at northern Israel, Israel hit the country’s two main international airports, “in the capital of Damascus and Aleppo in the north. It happened while an Iranian plane was inbound.” Also, the number of Americans killed by Hamas is now up to 27.
  • “Israel Warns Palestinians to Evacuate Northern Gaza ahead of Possible Ground Invasion.” I would bet so.
  • A day late, a shekel short: “Israel Loosens Strict Gun Control Laws To Arm ‘As Many Citizens As Possible.'” Benjamin Netanyahu and the entire Israeli political establishment deserve a good measure of blame for not doing this much sooner.
  • Speaking of guns in Gaza evidently Hamas now have a lot of rifles chambered in 5.56 NATO thanks to the Biden Administration’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan.
  • Steve Scalise drops out of the House Speaker race. Does this mean Jim Jordan is back in the picture? Jordan was briefly the frontrunner before Scalise emerged as the candidate preferred by a majority of Republican House members, and Jordan was also endorsed by Donald Trump. Update: Yep, it’s Jordan.
  • Even House Democrats are slamming The Squad for their anti-Israel/pro-Hamas bias.
  • Parents finally start winning battles against school tranny groomers.

    A revolt against government policies that many say usurp parental authority is spreading across the nation—especially in blue states where lawmakers have promoted transgender ideology and “gender-affirming care”—according to parents, attorneys, and teachers.

    For more than a year, California parents have shown up in droves at legislative hearings and phoned in by the hundreds to protest policies that encourage schools to keep social gender transitions of children secret. Teachers also have begun to refuse to hide information about a child’s gender identity from parents.

    Meanwhile, Democratic members of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus have spearheaded legislation supporting so-called gender-affirming care, especially for children, touting it as a “first-in-the-nation” model.

    Parental rights groups such as Our Duty have pushed back against the model, while groups such as Planned Parenthood, Equality California, and others support it.

    California school districts claim that they’re required by law to keep gender transitions secret from parents unless a child wants to tell his or her parents. But recent court rulings tell a different story.

    A federal judge on Sept. 14 blocked California’s Escondido Union School District from punishing two teachers who refused to comply with guidance issued by the California Department of Education that encourages educators to keep gender transitions of students secret from their parents.

  • The People’s Republic of California is getting ready to declare war on classic cars. “California is looking seriously at instituting, or allowing local governments to institute, zero emission zones in the near future. In preparation for such a move, the California Air Resources Board (or CARB) is reportedly gathering information about classic cars.”
  • Guy walking around Costco finds a whole hell of a lot more than 7% inflation.
  • The Texas Senate passes universal school choice. Now it goes to the House where Dade Phelen will find some way to kill it.
  • “El Paso Woman Sentenced to Prison for Impersonating Federal Agent, Wire Fraud.”

    Federal prosecutors announced that an El Paso woman received a prison sentence of more than seven years after admitting to impersonating immigration agents to swindle money from “undocumented noncitizen victims and their family members.”

    The Department of Justice (DOJ) stated that 53-year-old Ana Maria Hernandez pleaded guilty in April to 10 counts of wire fraud and one count of impersonation. Prosecutors say she pretended to be an official with Citizenship and Immigration Services and promised victims she could help them acquire American citizenship and collected fees.

  • Exxon is buying Pioneer Natural Resources for $59.5 billion in an all-stock deal that will make it the “undisputed US shale king.
  • Poor construction in illegal alien-populated Colony ridge is affecting Harris County water. “Harris County Commissioner Tom Ramsey (R-Pct. 3) warned his fellow commissioners on Tuesday that improper drainage construction in Colony Ridge was causing erosion and excessive silt to wash downstream into the county’s main source of drinking water.”
  • Follow-up: Josh Kruger, the recently-murdered gay left wing journalist who taunted conservatives, has been accused of grooming his accused killer from age 15. “The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the family of Kruger’s alleged killer, 19-year-old Robert Davis, says Kruger began a years-long relationship involving drugs that began when Davis was just 15-years-old. Davis remains at large.”
  • Every single donation sent by Christianity Today staffers went to Democrats.
  • Halt and catch fire.
  • Compilation of live action versions of video game ragdolls.
  • “White House Claims $6 Billion To Iran Absolutely Not Related To The Exactly $6 Billion Worth Of Rockets Being Fired Into Israel.”
  • “Emperor Hirohito Calls For Ceasefire After Bombing Of Pearl Harbor.”
  • I think he likes the apple.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Below is the tip jar, if you’re so inclined. Thanks to everyone who donated to the Non-Homeless Blogger Fund. I’m bad at thanking people individually the way I should, but let me know if you want public recognition in this space or not.





    Verifying the Hamas Baby Beheading

    Wednesday, October 11th, 2023

    Among the most horrifying Hamas atrocities to come to light following their terrorist attack on Israel is the report that they beheaded babies.

    Hamas terrorists slaughtered at least 40 babies and young children — decapitating some of them — at a kibbutz near the Gaza border, shaken Israeli officials and reporters at the scene said Tuesday.

    “It’s hard to even explain exactly just the mass casualties that happened right here,” visibly distraught i24 News correspondent Nicole Zedek said during a broadcast from Kibbutz Kfar Aza near Sderot about a quarter-mile from the Gaza Strip.

    “Babies with their heads cut off, that’s what [the soldiers] said. Gunned down. Families gunned down, completely gunned down in their beds,” Zedek said of the “sheer horror.

    “This is nothing that anyone would have even imagined,” she said.

    Top CNN reporter Nic Robertson, dressed in a military helmet and flak jacket, said, “There were so many murdered members of this Kibbutz.

    “Men, women, children, hands bound, shot, executed, heads cut,” he said.

    French journalist Margot Haddat added in a translated tweet, “It’s so macabre that no one wanted to reveal it until they had 100 percent confirmation.

    “It is a horror, a massacre. For those asking for the source. They are multiple: Israeli army, internal intelligence service and atrocious images which reached me and which I was able to cross-check,” she said. “But the best source remains this: courageous journalists from the foreign press who were able to see / agreed to see with their own eyes the bodies in Kfar Aza.”

    Here’s a tweet embedding that i24 report:

    I think that a journalist interviewing a soldier who witnessed the aftermath of the slaughter counts as confirmation.

    I wanted to verify this story not because I doubted the bloodthirsty murderers of Hamas were capable of such atrocities, but because it was just a little too on-the-nose. One should always question any narrative that fits a little too neatly into your preconceptions. And indeed, the story has undergone a subtle telephone game shift in the retelling, with it described as “Hamas beheaded 40 babies” instead of the still horrific “Hamas killed 40 young children and babies, some of whom were beheaded.”

    Israel is fighting an enemy who believes it is righteous to decapitate babies as long as they’re Jewish babies, because all slaughter of Jews, any Jews, is permitted because they believe them quite literally to be “apes and pigs.”

    That’s who Israel is fighting.

    Israel-Hamas War Update for October 9, 2023

    Monday, October 9th, 2023

    So many links, so little time. So lets dig in.

  • Nine Eleven Americans were killed in the terrorist attack on Israel.
  • Victor Davis Hanson on why the attack happened now.

    a) Ostensibly, radical Palestinians wanted to stop any rumored rapprochement between the Gulf monarchies—the traditional source of much of their cash—and Israel, by forcing the issue of Arab solidarity in times of “war”, especially through waging a gruesome attack aimed at civilians and encompassing executions and hostage taking. Iran likely was the driving force to prompt the war—given its greatest fear is a Sunni Arab-Israeli rapprochement.

    b) Arab forces have had only success against Israel through surprise attacks during Israeli holidays, as in the Yom Kippur War (i.e., was it any accident that the present attack began 50-years almost to the day after the October 6, 1973 beginning of the Yom Kippur War?). And so they struck again this Saturday during Simchat Torah, coming at the end of a weeklong Jewish celebration of Sukkot—in hopes that others will join in as happened in 1973. (So much for the Arab warnings not for Westerners to conduct war during Ramadan).

    c) Hamas may have reckoned that recent Israeli turmoil and mass leftist street protests over proposed reforms of the Israeli Supreme Court had led to permanent internal divisions and thus a climate of domestic distraction if not an erosion of deterrence.

    But, more importantly, in a larger sense the Biden administration has contributed both to the notion that Hamas was a legitimate Middle East player, and to the perception that the U.S. was backing away from its traditional support for Israel—to the delight of Hamas—based on the following inexplicable policies:

    1) In February Secretary of State Blinken had bragged that not only had the Biden administration resumed massive aid to the PLA cancelled by Trump, but cumulatively had transferred $1 billion—even as Palestinian authorities bragged that they would continue to pay bounties to the families of “martyrs” (i.e., those killed while conducting terrorists attacks against Israel).

    And millions of American dollars also went into Gaza, run by Hamas—despite the Biden administration’s efforts to keep mostly quiet the resumption of such inexplicable support.

  • How Hamas managed to launch its surprise attack.

    How did Hamas, the bloodthirsty jihad terror group in Gaza, perpetrate mayhem and destruction inside Israel on a scale never before seen?

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Saturday that “since this morning, the State of Israel is at war.” This was as Hamas fired over two thousand rockets into Israel, and over a hundred Israelis were murdered as jihad terrorists entered Israel and began killing people indiscriminately.
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    There has never been a Hamas jihad offensive from Gaza of this magnitude. In fact, throughout the history of modern Israel, there has never been anything like this, even when the Jewish state faced jihad coalitions of the neighboring Arab states in major wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973. So how was Hamas able to do it?

    For one thing, it was Shabbat in Israel, and the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. In that, this latest jihad resembles the 1973 war, which was launched on Yom Kippur. The idea in both cases was to catch the Israelis napping and at minimal preparedness, with large numbers of military personnel off for the holiday.

    But that was by no means all. There were widespread reports that as Hamas’ relentless rocket barrage began, Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome missile defense system was down. Reports on this so far are sketchy, but if the Islamic Republic of Iran, which as the chief financier of Hamas is clearly behind these attacks, has managed to breach Israeli security and interfere with the functioning of the Iron Dome, the ominous implications cannot be overstated. If Israel cannot manage to get the Iron Dome up and running on a secure basis, the Hamas attacks on Saturday could turn into a larger war that engulfs the entire region, as the Islamic Republic of Iran finally attempts to make good on decades of genocidal rhetoric directed at Israel.
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    Hamas also took advantage of vulnerabilities in Israel’s defenses. As jihadis screamed “Allahu akbar,” a bulldozer destroyed Israel’s fence at the Gaza border, allowing jihadis to pour into Israel in large numbers. Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, issued a triumphant communique on Telegram:

    Under intense missile cover and targeting of the enemy’s command and control systems, the Mujahideen of the Qassam Brigades were able to cross the enemy’s defensive line and carry out a simultaneous coordinated attack on more than 50 sites in the Gaza Division and the southern region of the occupation army, which led to the overthrow of the division’s defense, and our Mujahideen are still They are [sic] fighting heroic battles in 25 locations so far, and the fighting is currently taking place at the “Ra’im” base, the headquarters of the Gaza Division.

    It is a jihad of victory or martyrdom.

    Why wasn’t there a full-fledged wall at the Gaza border? Well, just imagine how the Biden regime, which resumed shoveling millions to the Palestinians after Trump stopped doing so, would have reacted if the Israelis had tried to construct such a thing. They would have denounced it as another “apartheid wall” and demanded that it be dismantled.

    The Israeli government, however, could fall as a result of this and certainly bears a great deal of responsibility. Yet here again, the ultimate fault lies with the Biden regime. Ever since Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected prime minister and embarked upon efforts to reform the Israeli judiciary, the Bidenites have been undermining him in every way possible, and have even been accused of funding the massive protests in Israel against the Netanyahu government.

    How much of what Hamas was able to get away with on Saturday was the result of the U.S. pressure upon Israel and favoring of the Palestinians, as the American government turned a blind eye to the genocidal jihad rhetoric that permeates the Palestinian areas every day? How distracted was the Israeli government in having to spend the bulk of its time on internal disagreements that the Biden regime had exacerbated instead of paying the necessary attention to national defense?

  • How could Hamas fund these attacks? Well, their sugar daddy Iran just got $6 billion from the Biden administration.

    Prominent Republicans laid into the Biden administration for empowering Iran on Saturday, just hours after Hamas launched thousands of rockets into Israel and sent large groups of terrorists surging across the Gaza border.

    The historic attack on Israel comes just weeks after the Biden administration agreed to release $6 billion in frozen Iranian oil revenue in exchange for the release of five American prisoners. While the Biden administration insisted that the revenue could only be used for humanitarian purposes, Iranian leaders made clear after the deal closed that they would use the revenue how they saw fit.

    As Iran is Hamas’ primary financial backer, a number of influential Republicans lawmakers and primary candidates swiftly drew a connection between the administration’s indulgent approach to the anti-American regime and the terrorist organization’s willingness and ability to carry out its most complex and sprawling operation in decades.

  • America’s Betrayal of Israel.

    For the better part of the past decade, the United States has pursued a foreign policy designed to strengthen Iran and enable it to form a strong sphere of influence in the region. This is the idea behind what Tony Badran and Michael Doran called “the realignment,” a vision of a new world order in which America partners with Iran in order to “find a more stable balance of power that would make [the Middle East] less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection.” Those words aren’t Badran and Doran’s; they’re Robert Malley’s, Barack Obama’s lead negotiator on the Iran deal who, as Semafor reported this week, helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Biden himself, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, spoke of “an integrated Middle East,” using the phrase no less than three times to make clear that his administration was intent on pursuing his predecessor’s commitment to seeing Iran not as a U.S. foe but as our collaborator.

    And the Biden administration wasn’t just talking the talk. It was also walking the walk, from unfreezing billions in assets to make it easier for Tehran to support its proxy Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon to sending huge cash infusions used primarily to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of unvetted “security personnel.” And while the previous administration halted all aid to the Palestinians—directly because of the “pay for slay” policies that support the families of those who slaughter Israelis—the Biden administration was quick to reverse the decision.

    Lots of people argued that this was simply clear-minded realpolitik after decades of disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bullshit. Here’s how you know this policy was, and is, motivated not by what’s best for America but by what would kneecap the Jewish state: Because it extended to inside Israel’s borders.

    In addition to creating the external circumstances for terror, the Biden administration did everything in its power to derail Israel’s democratically elected government and prevent it from being able to see an attack like today’s coming. That the Israelis let themselves fall for this was stupidity of criminal order. But the invisible hand here was America’s. Biden himself took to CNN to call Netanyahu’s government “the most extreme” he’s ever seen, and lost no opportunity to lecture his Israeli counterpart about democratic values. The former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, took the unprecedented step of intervening in the country’s domestic affairs, announcing ominously that he “think[s] most Israelis want the United States to be in their business.” And if words weren’t enough, the administration also sent American dollars to support the anti-Netanyahu NGOs organizing the protests that brought Israel to a halt for months.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Israel orders the complete siege of Gaza. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”
  • Hezbollah has been getting frisky, firing shells into northern Israel, but I’m not sure there’s any sign of a widespread attack. Yet.
  • Israeli continues to pound targets in Gaza. No sign of a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza. Yet.
  • I think this is a good place to end the most, since there’s probably a zillion stories I could link…

    The Final Solution To The Gaza Problem

    Sunday, October 8th, 2023

    Let’s look at what the most logical outcome to Hamas’ largest large scale attack on Israel might be.

    You’re not going to like it.

    First, some context in this Haviv Rettig Gur Times of Israel piece linked by David Bernstein at Instapundit:

    It was a horror, interminable, impossible. Hour after hour, families sat huddled in their homes awaiting rescue from the Hamas fighters streaming through their towns and villages.

    Families were butchered in cold blood. In one home, a terrorist shot the parents dead, took a child’s cellphone and started broadcasting it all in a livestream on their Facebook account. Grandmothers were pulled in wheelchairs to waiting vehicles ready to carry them as hostages into Gaza. Then came the mothers carrying babies. Footage circulated on social media, put there by Hamas, of an Israeli child asking his mother if the gunmen that surrounded them were going to kill them. “They said they won’t,” the mother replied as they were taken outside to some unknown fate.

    The stream of videos didn’t stop. An IDF soldier’s body was paraded in Gaza. A young woman, bleeding, was pulled by the hair from a car after being kidnapped and taken into the Strip. And all of it was broadcast by Hamas to the world in joyful pride, sparking celebrations in Tehran, Ramallah and no small part of the online pro-Palestinian activist world.

    And all the while came the stream of messages on Twitter and Whatsapp from Israelis still surrounded by the roving gunmen, friends and relatives begging for a rescue that never came.

    Hour after agonizing hour.

    Snip.

    Until Saturday, Israelis believed they were strong and safe. On Saturday, they started to believe that they were neither.

    In that simple shift, the Hamas attack was massively successful.

    As Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Hamza put it while the attack was still underway: “This powerful enemy is an illusion made of dust and capable of being defeated and broken. Our heroes made the enemy small and humiliated, feeling death everywhere.”

    Theories abound about Hamas’s reasons for the assault. Many suggested it was an Iranian-ordered disruption of Israeli-Saudi normalization. Others focused on internal Palestinian politics and suggested Hamas was positioning itself, even at the cost of an inevitable and crushing Israeli retaliation, as the unquestioned leader of the Palestinian struggle after Mahmoud Abbas’s death. Still others said the reasons were simpler: The two Hamas leaders in Gaza who prepared and launched the operation were military chief Muhammad Deif and political head Yihye Sinwar. The first lost his family to an Israeli airstrike aimed at him, the second sat 22 years in an Israeli prison. Neither needed an overwrought geopolitical rationale to piece together such an operation.

    There is probably some truth in all these theories. All make sense. But none are how Hamas itself explained the operation in real-time.

    Here lies a part of Palestinian thinking and discourse that many of Palestine’s Western defenders ignore, both because it’s a hard sell to Western audiences and because they don’t really understand it themselves. Palestinian “resistance,” as conceived by Hamas, is about much more than settlements, occupation or the Green Line. A larger theory of Islamic renewal is at work.

    As he announced the start of Saturday’s attack, Hamas military commander Deif said it was meant to disrupt a planned Israeli demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And when Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh called on Saturday for “every Muslim everywhere and all the free people of the world to stand in this just battle in defense of Al-Aqsa and the Prophet’s mission,” he meant just that, that the fight was over holy things, over Islam’s redemptive promise.

    This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas’s political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel. Israel is more than a mere occupier or oppressor in this narrative, it is a rebellion against God and the divinely-ordained trajectory of history. And by showing Israelis in their weakness, the thinking goes, Israelis are somehow actually made weak. Redemption requires only the faith of its believers to be fulfilled, and seeing is believing.

    The footage from Saturday, the snuff videos shared gleefully by Hamas supporters, including in some Western far-left circles, weren’t an aberration. Hamas gunmen didn’t get “carried away,” as some explained. They were the essence of the whole enterprise. They were Hamas’s basic message to Israelis: That they weren’t being killed and kidnapped just for tactical advantage in the struggle for Palestinian independence, but rather were being humiliated and dehumanized as traitors against God.

    Snip.

    The Israel that emerged from Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Deluge” operation was different from the one that went into it. A tectonic shift had occurred in the country’s psyche. The horrors inflicted by Hamas sparked rage and an intense feeling of vulnerability. Where Hamas had always seemed an implacable but ultimately containable enemy, it had now proven it could bring the danger into Israeli homes, could slaughter children and kidnap grandmothers while all the vaunted power of the Israel Defense Forces was helpless to stop it.

    Hamas had made itself an intolerable threat.

    The change is so profound and palpable that many Israeli analysts, apparently assuming that Hamas understands the consequences that this psychological fallout will have for Gaza, argued on Saturday that the terror group was surprised by its own success.

    “In my estimation,” tweeted analyst Avi Issacharoff, “the military and political leadership of Hamas did not expect these successes. They meant to kidnap two or three as part of a massive killing spree. But this many? Their problem is that this success may turn into a Pyrrhic victory. It seems to me there’s now a consensus in the Israeli elite and among the public that what was won’t be anymore.”

    Snip.

    There are many different kinds of power. There is the power of the confident, safe and strong. But there’s also the very different sort of power of the wounded, weak and desperate. These are psychological states, not objective realities. And pivoting from one to the other changes everything.

    “A wounded tiger,” Arthur Golden wrote in Memoirs of a Geisha, “is a dangerous beast.”

    It’s an image with a long pedigree in Israeli strategic thinking. Moshe Dayan was said to have urged Israel to act like a “wounded tiger,” unpredictable and desperate, to deter its enemies from attack.

    Palestinians sometimes use the image to mock Israel or shrug off the impact of an Israeli reprisal attack.

    Hamas is now putting that old adage to the test. Israelis can handle humiliation; they are less moved by the politics of honor than are their enemies. But these heirs of a collective memory forged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience of defenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. Hamas seemed to do everything possible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vulnerability.

    And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.

    A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.

    Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.

    I largely agree with this analysis. Also, for the first time since the Yom Kippur War, Israel has formally declared war on Hamas, which means that what will now ensue will be a very different type of war than Operation Cast Lead.

    Let’s review how Israel had tried to deal with Hamas:

    1. Israel tried occupying Gaza. That didn’t work.
    2. Israel tried building walls and letting Hamas run Gaza. That didn’t work.

    This leads inexorably to the only viable solution for Israel to prevent Hamas attacking and murdering Israeli citizens from Gaza.

    1. Palestinians will no longer be allowed to occupy Gaza.

    No Palestinians in Gaza = No terror attacks from Gaza.

    Occupation didn’t work. Coexistence didn’t work. But ethnic cleansing will.

    Keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be the ethnic cleansing Nazi Germany inflicted on Europe during World War II. It could be the ethnic cleansing the Allies implemented in Europe after World War II. If you were an ethnic German east of the Oder-Neisse line, you were no longer be allowed to live where you were. If you were lucky, maybe you got to pack a few suitcases before being trucked west. That’s what happens when your nation starts an illegal war of aggression and loses.

    The parallels with Hamas and Gaza are obvious.

    Palestinians could be deported from the Gaza strip and replaced with Israeli settlers. Hell, Israel is rich enough that it could even financially compensate existing land owners. With Israelis running and owning everything, and no more money spent on murder tunnels and rocket attacks, Gaza would quickly transition from a clapped-out Arab city to a modern western one. In ten years, all that valuable seaside property is going to look more like the French Riviera than a Damascus slum.

    And where will Israel forcibly relocate Palestinians to? Obviously the West Bank. Moreover, beyond war crime trials for the leaders, Israel doesn’t even need to slaughter Hamas footsoliders off the battlefield. They merely need to hand them over to the tender mercies of hated rival Fatah, who will no doubt be delighted to do it for them. And Palestinian-on-Palestinian bloodletting rarely makes the nightly news. In their heart of hearts, Fatah probably hates Jews almost as much as Hamas, but they no longer make such a public spectacle of their hatred. Why divert all that international guilt-geld into missiles and murder tunnels when it can be more profitably diverted to high living and Swiss bank accounts? Fatah’s current corrupt state is largely a regression to the Arab governing mean.

    Would Egypt object? Formally, I’m sure. But remember that the current Egyptian government is in power because they literally deposed their own homegrown jihadist lunatics. An Israeli Gaza would probably offer Egypt a lot of economic growth possibilities, from more direct rail and road ties to be having low-labor-cost Egyptian maquiladoras for Israeli factories in Gaza.

    How would the rest of the Arab World react to genteel ethnic cleansing of Gaza? The first answer is “Who cares?” The second answer is feigned indignation masking real indifference. It’s an open secret that other Arabs hate the Palestinians and treat them like dirt. No Arab state in 2023 is going to war over Gaza. The worst you’ll see is some more toothless UN resolutions, and maybe temporary suspensions of trade agreements, followed by quiet reinstatement 6 months to a year later. Hamas is backed by Saudi Arabia’s bitter rival Iran, so don’t expect many tears to be shed over their demise in Riyadh.

    Expect impotent rage among European lefty types at their favorite victims/psychopathic killers getting snuffed out. But when has Europe needed an excuse to hate Jews? Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. Expect a few mostly toothless trade sanctions and cancellation of a few meaningless cultural exchange programs. They probably won’t even suspend Israel from the Eurovision Song Contest. Plus the Russo-Ukrainian War is still going to be the top foreign policy concern in the EU for some time to come.

    And the Biden Administration? Certainly the ideological core of the Democratic Party is hostile to Israel, but Biden himself has made all the proper noises condemning Hamas. U.S.-Israeli defense and intelligence cooperation goes so deep into the deep state that it’s hard to see anything short of Israel tossing nukes around to sever it. And even that might not be enough. And Biden is unlikely to want to risk alienating Jewish voters (and donors) ahead of the 2024 Presidential election.

    Israel has declared war on Hamas, and countries that lose wars (as opposed to police actions) typically lose territory. Spain lost numerous overseas territories following the loss of the Spanish-American War. Today no party in Madrid demands the reconquest of Guam.

    After disposing of as many Hamas fighters as it deems necessary, Fatah might be too hard pressed to deal with the sudden influx of population to launch a futile intifada to recapture Gaza. Hell, Israel might even give some West Bank settlements back in order to transfer Jewish settlers to Gaza.

    Keep in mind, I’m not advocating this as a course of action (not my circus, not my monkeys). I’m saying that if Israel has finally found the existence of a jihadist death cult that periodically kidnaps, tortures and murders Israeli civilians for the crime of being Jews on its doorstep intolerable, as now appears to be the case, then this is the one course of action that logic dictates is necessary to ensure, with absolute, 100% certainty, that it never happens again.

    And if Fatah does decide to follow Hamas’ path of total war against Jews? Israel can build it’s defensive wall higher and deeper. If the situation becomes intolerable in 2053, or 2073, then the same solution may come into play again.

    From the river to the sea, Israel would be free…of Palestinians.

    The First Time As Tragedy, The Second Time As Farce

    Saturday, October 7th, 2023

    Hamas decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War by launching another war.

    Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared “we are at war, and we will win it” early Saturday as the country’s air force began striking targets in Gaza in response to a surprise Hamas attack on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, involving more than 3,000 rockets and groups of terrorists descending on Israeli territory by land, sea, and even paraglider.

    At least 40 Israelis have been killed in the fighting and at least 740 injured, the Israeli military said, and videos posted on social media appear to show Hamas taking civilian hostages. A militant group in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also claims to be holding a group of Israeli soldiers hostage.

    As rockets rained down on central and southern Israel, the televisions began broadcasting footage of armed groups of Hamas terrorists pouring into towns across the country in pickup trucks, the Times of Israel reported. In response, the IDF deployed forces to the south, where troops began engaging with the Hamas invaders.

    The Israeli Air Force also scrambled dozens of jets to strike four command centers and 17 military compounds in the Gaza strip, the air force announced on X. At least 198 Palestinians have been killed and 1,610 have been wounded in the retaliatory attacks, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

    The biggest difference between the real Yom Kippur War and Hamas’ farce is the size of of the opposition. In 1973, Israel was attacked by the armies of Egypt and Syria supported by forces from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Kuwait, Tunisia, and Morocco, plus some random units from Cuba and North Korea, a coalition that theoretically could wipe Israel off the map. By contrast, Hamas is a terrorist organization that controls some 141 miles of square territory and survives on handouts from the UN, EU, Iran and Syria.

    Israel has the most modern and technologically advanced army in the Middle East, and arguably the second most technologically advanced in the world. Their air force is entirely American-made, including F-35s.

    The news that Hamas is using technicals is both interesting and obvious, as they’re a very cost-effective option. They’re not ideal for urban combat or stand-up fights, but if they can get out of the built-up area around Gaza and out into the flatter, more open terrain to the south they can do some damage as hit and run forces, at least until the Israeli Air Force can track them down. I assume Hamas has drones, because it’s 2023 and everyone has drones, plus their patron Iran makes some.

    Enjoy some random combat footage, including what looks like a knocked-out Merkava tank.

    We all know what the outcome of this conflict will be: Hamas will kill some Israeli civilians and a few IDF soldiers, and Israel will pound the snot out of Hamas and it’s command and control infrastructure, after which it will take Hamas a decade or so of payments from its sugar daddies to build up enough to do it all over again.

    Hamas is a pustule that occasionally needs to be lanced, but little more.

    Update: Yep, drones. IDF needs to go back to the makers of Trophy and ask why it didn’t stop a slow-moving, top-drop munition.

    Gaza ReBoomed

    Wednesday, June 16th, 2021

    My assessment that the recent Gaza flareup might have bought the new coalition government of Naftali Bennett “several months of relative peace in which to operate” appears to have been premature:

    Israel’s military said it launched airstrikes at the Gaza Strip on Tuesday night after militants in the Palestinian territory fired incendiary balloons into southern Israel.

    The counterattack targeting Hamas armed military compounds occurred early Wednesday morning local time and marked the first major flare-up between Israel and Gaza since May 21, when a ceasefire agreement ended eleven days of hostilities. The Israel Defense Forces said the targets were used by Hamas’s Khan Yunis and Gaza Brigades for “terror activities.”

    The Israeli military said in a statement that it was “ready for all scenarios, including renewed fighting in the face of continued terrorist acts emanating from Gaza.”

    The airstrike came after militants launched arson balloons from Gaza, sparking nearly two dozen fires, according to Fox News.

    Bombings will continue until morale improves…

    LinkSwarm for May 21, 2021

    Friday, May 21st, 2021

    Biden behaving badly, Palestinian backers beating Jews, Portland crime soars, and the latest pause to the latest Israel beatdown of Hamas. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Dispatches from the swamp: “Former FBI director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and spoke with the then vice president in 2016 ‘to explore lucrative future work options’ with Hunter as the middle man.” Who watches the watchmen?
  • Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter, but worse:

    There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something. Biden’s presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.

    We’re five months into Biden’s presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter’s incompetence by Christmas. Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn’t exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.

    Snip.

    For Carter, this came in the form of skyrocketing inflation and fuel shortages, the hostage crisis in Iran, compounded by an inability to work with Congress and constantly butting heads with Tip O’Neill and the Left wing of the Democrats. Carter, simply put, did not get how to work with Congress when he arrived in Washington, having spent his entire career playing Georgia politics. Unfortunately, this contributed to his inability to pass legislation, even though at the time Democrats controlled the Senate.

    Moreover, Carter’s inability to get his own messaging right added to his problems. The best episode of this is of course the notorious “Malaise” speech, where Carter essentially told Americans that their best days were behind them. This certainly didn’t inspire confidence when there was indeed a crisis of confidence on the home front, while abroad the Soviets and Iranians caused their fair share of mischief. It took the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan to fix things.

    During the 1980 campaign, an observer took note of the difference between the two men saying, “If you ask Jimmy Carter what time it is, he’d tell you how to build a watch but if you asked Ronald Reagan what time it is, he’d say it time to get this country moving again.” Reagan always knew where he was going and where he wanted to lead the nation,

    Today, Biden only seems capable of being led by the hand by his staffers and signing whatever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer shove across his desk. When he does bother to make rare appearances, he seems to always pour gasoline on the proverbial fire.

    Already, inflation is rising under Biden’s direction, and despite a jobs relief bill that spent trillions of dollars, less than 300,000 new jobs were created as a result. On top of that, Biden seems determined, come Hell or high water, to ignore the crisis on the southern border, so much so that he refuses to call the situation an actual crisis. Did I also mention he’s done little to nothing to help Israel while Hamas pounds it with rockets lately?

    That’s all well and good (Biden is hardly the first president to bungle domestic and foreign policy) but Biden seems to genuinely care little for the country he was elected to govern.

    Unlike Carter, who to his credit is a patriot, Biden has caved to the whims of the radical deconstructionists by ignoring the very real threats of Antifa and BLM. Biden has entertained the possibility of giving federal grants to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT), which postulates that all White Americans are born evil and that all Black Americans are born victims. While on paper CRT is supposed to teach “diversity and inclusion,” in reality it’s undoing the sacrifices of the Civil Rights pioneers who wanted us to not see color or race.

    Jimmy Carter was a bad president but he wasn’t a bad man. Biden is a bad president and a bad man. Carter never at his worst ever contemplated the things Biden does willy nilly, such as revoking Donald Trump’s protection of American statues from the evil of BLM and Antifa.

  • “‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens.” Electing the hard-left to control your cities the quickest way to destroy your quality of life. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Masking doesn’t do jack against Flu Manchu:

    The predominant conclusion is that face masks have a very important role in places such as hospitals, but there exists very little evidence of widespread benefit for members of the public (adults or children) as well as evidence that masking is truly an ineffectual way to manage pandemic-related spread of viral disease. As Kolstoe stated, it has become less about the science and more about politics and a symbol of solidarity.

  • Israel reaches ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza.

  • Of course the Associated Press knew they were sharing an office with Hamas:

    The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. In fact, Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, even said as much on Saturday. “I talked to someone who *used* to work out of that building periodically who said he believed there may have been Hamas offices there,” Vietor tweeted. In other words, anyone who worked in the building on a regular basis understood that they likely shared an address with the Islamic Resistance Movement. Vietor also acknowledged on Twitter that terror groups “purposefully co-locate operations with civilians. But that is not a new problem.” Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.

    Here’s the thing: There’s nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes. It happens all the time in the Middle East. CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open. The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

    This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza. The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it’s never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance. That’s because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity. Through direct threats as well as fixers and minders appointed to steer journalists in the right direction, Hamas lets every press outfit and journalist in Gaza know that if they do not understand this fundamental angle, they are not welcome in Gaza.

  • Peace-loving Palestinian supporters in London: “‘F**k the Jews’ ‘Rape their daughters.'”
  • More of the same fun in New York City: “‘Pro-Palestinian’ Gangs Attack Jews In Multiple Locations in Manhattan.”
  • “China aligns with Palestinians to deflect criticism of Uyghur Muslim genocide.” Call it the Axis of Scumbags. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brandon Smith on why the U.S. military will never be woke:

    The language of leftists and globalists can be rather confusing because they never mean exactly what they say. The word “diversity” generally means “more leftists/Marxists”, not more brown people. Leftists are incredibly racist towards any minority person that argues from a conservative or moderate position. The phrase “white supremacist” is usually a hatchet reference to all conservatives. So, to translate their woke gibberish, the goal of the Pentagon under Biden will be to divest the ranks of the military of conservatives and replace them with more regime friendly leftists.

    The goal of propaganda is often to create false word associations in the minds of the masses. The mainstream media constantly mentions “white supremacists”, “neo-nazis” and “extremists” within the same articles they mention “conservatives”. Though there is no evidence whatsoever to link the majority of conservatives with race identity groups, the hope within the establishment is that the conservative base in the US can be dismantled through guilt by manufactured association.

    Anyone who stands against the social justice mob is labeled “white supremacist”. Therefore, all conservatives are white supremacists, because the social justice cult controls who gets labeled. The social justice cult thus becomes the self anointed arbiters of who gets canceled and who does not. See how that works?

    As far as the military is concerned, the obvious intent is to link all conservative views with “extremism and racism”, thereby creating an artificial rationale for removing conservatives from the ranks or denying them the ability to sign up in the first place. The Pentagon is already openly discussing plans to comb through the social media histories of troops in order to root out those with “extremist backgrounds” (conservatives and constitutionalists). In theory, this would only leave devout social justice warriors behind. It is a political and ideological cleansing of the armed forces.

    The Cult of Woke is like a hive of parasitic termites that feeds its way through the various pillars of western society until they crumble; once a pillar is hollowed out, they move onto the next one, and the next one until the nation or civilization breaks apart completely. As the nation is destabilized, they then offer their own social model as a solution to the problem. Invariably, their model is one that eliminates all individual freedom and inherent rights in the name of collective “safety” and “equity”. It is totalitarianism posing as compassion.

    To be sure, the Department of Defense is fast-tracking the woke agenda.

    Snip.

    Straight white men are noticeably absent from the Pentagon’s new series of commercials, and the people represented are a perfect pie chart of diversity hiring, even though the US is around 70% white and around 96% straight (according to Gallup).

    But who are these commercials really made for? The Army admits they had to search a worldwide roster of soldiers, obtaining only 100 submissions that fit their woke criteria, and then filtered those submissions down to just a handful that met the diversity requirements of the marketing campaign. Some of the commercials are subtle, and some of them are not. The US campaign seems to be mimicking the “Snowflake” ad campaign used by the UK military in 2019 in a bid to attract what they call “Me Me Me Millennials”.

    Clearly, the percentage of soldiers that check most or all of the woke boxes is tiny. The commercials are also notably in cartoon form, because SJWs have a hard time absorbing information unless it is animated.

    Snip.

    Globalists are very mindful of statistical realities, and they know that the current military dynamic is against them; hence their growing thirst for the wokification of our branches of defense. I want to remind conservatives that this is a good thing. They are trying to force social justice politics into the military because the military is the exact opposite of what they want it to be.

    For example, polling in 2016 showed that around 31% to 35% of the US military is Republican, while around 25% to 29% votes Democrat. But what about the remainder? The media often calls the remaining current serving voters “moderates” or “independents”. As it turns out, up to 40% of the military is actually libertarian or constitutionalist leaning according to polls.

    The mainstream media tries to hide this fact by only talking about “Republican votes” and “Democrat votes”, but the reality is that the vast majority of the military is conservative oriented, with values based in personal freedom and constitutionalism. That 40% of libertarians and constitutionalists is what the elites are really worried about. This is who they are referring to when they talk about “extremists” in the military.

    And what about the 25% to 29% of Democrats? That is the extent of the left’s hold within the general ranks of the military and it is improbable that most of these democrats are hard leftists. Further studies also show that the majority of veterans leaving the military identify overwhelmingly as Republican, conservative or “independent”, not as Democrat or leftist.

    This is probably why the latest social justice recruitment commercials by the Army are getting ratioed into oblivion by soldiers and the public alike. In response the Army YouTube page has shut down comments. Last I checked, the new LGBTQ and feminist inspired “Emma: The Calling” Army video had only 700 up-votes and over 33,000 down-votes. This is an epic fail. Where are all the hardcore social justice warriors just itching to join the military and “get some”? They don’t exist. The establishment is trying to appeal to a phantom demographic.

    The fact is, the only place you will find a preponderance of woke lunatics in the military is among the brass and sometimes in the officer corps; the leadership within the pentagon has been carefully groomed to create a leftist/globalist consolidation, and this has been going on for decades. Generals are for the most part politicians, not warriors (SPECIAL NOTE: Never trust retired generals or retired CIA agents, even if they claim to be on the side of liberty).

    While military leadership might go woke, this does not mean the rest of the military will, nor does it mean that troops will follow unconstitutional orders from such people.

  • Thanks to antifa, a Soros-backed DW and underfunding the police, Portland is enjoying record-breaking levels of violence and homicide.
  • They’re also the only big city that doesn’t use body cameras for police. Probably because they’d exonerate police and help convict their precious pet antifa rioters, and the powers that be in Portland don’t want that…
  • Alan Dershowitz wonders why the hard left loves Palestinian terrorists.

    In a world in which massive violations of human rights have, tragically, become the norm, why has the hard left focused on one of the least compelling of those causes — namely, the Palestinians? Where is the concern for the Kurds, the Chechens, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans? There are no campus demonstrations on their behalf, no expressions of concern by “the Squad” in Congress, no United Nations resolutions, no recurring op-eds in The New York Times, and no claims that the nations that oppress these groups have no right to exist.

    On the merits and demerits of their claims, the Palestinians have the weakest case. They have been offered statehood and independence on numerous occasions: in 1938, 1948, 1967, 2000-2001 and 2008. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Yet, even now, Palestinian leaders refuse to sit down and negotiate a reasonable two-state solution. As the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once aptly put it, the Palestinian leadership never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

    Nor are history and morality on their side. The Palestinian leadership allied itself with Nazism and Hitler in the 1940s, with Egyptian tyranny and antisemitism in the 1950s, and with international terrorism from the 1960s forward.

    The usual history snipped.

    The Palestinian people have suffered more from the ill-advised decisions of their leaders than from the actions of Israel.

    Back to the present: Hamas commits a double war crime every time it fires a lethal rocket at Israeli civilians from areas populated by its civilians, who they use as human shields. Israel responds proportionally in self-defense, as President Biden has emphasized. The Israel Defense Forces go to extraordinary lengths to try to minimize civilian casualties among Palestinians, despite Hamas’ policy of using civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and high-rise buildings — to store, fire and plan their unlawful rockets and incendiary devices. Yet the hard left blames Israel alone, and many on the center-left create a moral equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.

    Why? The answer is clear and can be summarized in one word: Jews.

    The enemy of the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Chechens are not — unfortunately for them — the Jews. Hence, there is little concern for their plight. If the perceived enemy of the Palestinians were not the Jews, there would be little concern for their plight as well. This was proved by the relative silence that greeted the massacre of Palestinians by Jordan during “Black September” in 1970, or the killings of Palestinian Authority leaders in Gaza during the Hamas takeover in 2007. There has been relative silence, too, about the more than 4,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians— killed by Syria during that country’s current civil war. It is only when Jews or their nation are perceived to be oppressing Palestinians that the left seems to care about them.

  • Arizona’s Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema isn’t having any of it:

  • Orthodox Jews: “Live Near Hipsters, Vote Like Mormons.”

    The Pew study highlights a more interesting recent development among Orthodox Jews. They increasingly consider themselves—and are considered by others—to be separate within the Jewish community. Only 9 percent of Orthodox Jews feel “a lot” in common with Reform Jews, and a similar percentage of Reform Jews say the same about the Orthodox. In fact, both groups report feeling more in common with Jews in Israel than with their fellow citizens of the same religion but different denominations.

    Like their secular counterparts, Orthodox Jews are clustered in the Northeast, but they differ in having lower levels of educational attainment. About 60 percent of Jews overall are college graduates, almost double the rate of the American population as a whole, but only 37 percent of Orthodox Jews have college degrees. And even though these religious Jews are largely urban and suburban, they vote like rural religious voters. As Alper and Cooperman wrote, “among Orthodox Jews, three-quarters say they are Republican or lean that way. And that percentage has been trending up.”

    This split raises questions about the size of the various communities. The non-religious part of the Jewish community has long been and remains larger than the Orthodox component. Only 9 percent of American Jewish adults identify as Orthodox. They are, like the rest of the Jewish community, grouped largely in blue states. Only eight states have more than 200,000 Jews: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. All of these but Florida voted Democratic in the last presidential election, and six of the eight—all but Florida and Pennsylvania—have voted Democratic in every presidential election this century. However, adding in the seven states with Jewish populations in the range of 100,000-200,000 yields a decidedly more purple cohort: Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. The Jewish vote may be small, but it matters.

    The Pew study also makes it clear that the Jewish community is changing. Eleven percent of Jews under 30 were Orthodox in 2013—largely in line with their percentage among the older set. In the new study, that number rose to 17 percent—a remarkable shift in an eight-year period. At the same time, the older generation has a disproportionately low representation among the Orthodox. Only 3 percent of Jews aged 65 and older identify as Orthodox, and only 1 percent of Jews over 65 belong to the Haredi, or non-Modern Orthodox, community. Given Pew’s other findings on the Orthodox community, including much lower rates of intermarriage (2 percent vs. 47 percent in the non-religious community), and given the fact that Orthodox Jews continue to have more children, it is reasonable to assume that the Orthodox percentage of the Jewish community will grow even more in the future.

  • Kamala the unpopular. “Her favorability is just at 41%, and her unfavorability stands at 48%. Most problematic: One in 5 Democrats polled deemed her unfavorable, as did nearly 3 in 5 independents.”
  • Things that make you go “Hmmmmm”:
    

  • Facebook “fact check” is just there to push the proper narratives, the truth be damned.
  • Scottish university may expel law student Lisa Keogh for daring to point out women have vaginas.
  • AT&T Strikes $43 Billion Deal With Discovery To Launch New Streaming Giant.” “AT&T’s vast WarnerMedia holdings, which include CNN and HBO, will combine with Discovery’s assets – including Discovery Channel and Animal Planet – to create what management hopes will be a formidable competitor to Netflix and Disney.” Yeah, no. CNN is probably a negative asset at this point. And the price tag sounds a whole lot less impressive. And the price tag sounds a lot less impressive when you realize AT&T paid $85 billion for those assets less than three years ago…
  • Follow-up: “The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.”
  • “19-Year Veteran Cop Suspended for Allegedly Running Meth Lab Out of NJ Home.” I think they frown on that even in New Jersey…
  • Speaking of New Jersey, a single rural New Jersey deli has a market cap of $100 million.
  • “Man Hijacks School Bus Full of Children, Gets Frustrated And Lets Everyone Go Because The Kids Won’t Stop Asking Him Questions.”
  • Speaking of attempted crimes gone wrong:

  • Boom:

  • Rudy Tomjanovich inducted into the basketball hall of fame. Long overdue.
  • “BLM Sends Rioters To Gaza To Protest Israel By Burning Down Palestinian Businesses.”
  • “Biden Worried Gas Shortages May Hurt Carter’s Chances Against Reagan.”
  • I laughed:

  • Followup: IDF To Hamas: Psych!

    Saturday, May 15th, 2021

    In yesterday’s LinkSwarm, I mentioned it was unclear whether IDF ground forces had actually entered Gaza or not. Well, it turns out there’s a reason for that. It was a ruse.

    Just after midnight Friday the Israeli Defense Force spokesman released a carefully-worded statement, informing the press in Hebrew, Arabic, and English that “IDF air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.”

    The statement was technically accurate. Tanks, artillery and other IDF units that can accurately be described as “ground troops” indeed joined the Airforce in an attack on Gaza. Then again, it was also, perhaps deliberately so, a bit off the point.

    Those ground forces conducted their attack from the Israeli side of the Gaza border. They did not cross into the Hamas-controlled strip, as in the last Gaza war, in 2014. At that time a major land invasion resulted in a high number of casualties, including many civilians. With that in mind, leading American editors ran ahead of what turned out to be the more important “ground troop” story.

    One reason is that the IDF English-language spokesman, Jonathan Cornicus, went a bit further than the original statement, telling reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, and wire services that troops indeed went into a Gaza enclave, telling them, “Yes. As it’s written in the statement: Indeed, ground forces are attacking in Gaza. That is that they are in the Strip,” according to the Times of Israel.

    The Hebrew language IDF spokesman, Hidai Zilberman, later clarified that no troops infiltrated Gaza, but by then the headlines were out. As Liz Sly, a Washington Post reporter based in Beirut, dramatically tweeted, “Breaking: Israeli troops have crossed into Gaza, the Israeli military confirmed early Friday.”

    Stories on the start of the IDF invasion in Gaza ran in major American outlets, emphasizing Israeli escalation in the war and pending horrors for Gaza civilians. Yet a day later, the tenor of the story changed. And as it turns out, the target media consumers for the spokesman’s original statement weren‘t knee jerk anti-Israel media reporters at all.

    According to a story widely reported in Israel Friday, the IDF and its spokespersons conducted a carefully-constructed ruse to achieve a life-and-death military objective. It was aimed at Hamas’ strategy of employing a vast network of underground tunnels.

    Heavily fortified facilities beneath Gaza’s cities (built, incidentally, with concrete supplied to the strip as international humanitarian assistance) serve as military headquarters, transportation routes, and, at times, attack venues to infiltrate Israel.

    In an emergency, these tunnels serve also as a hiding place for Hamas military brass. Unlike most of Gaza’s civilian population, these commanders have a place to hide when attacked from the air. Arms and other major military assets, including Hamas’s most secret weapons, are also stored underground.

    Once the story about a pending ground invasion led major world press outlets, Hamas bigwigs ran for safety under the ground, lest Israeli troops would find and kill them.

    Except that Israeli intelligence apparently has had these underground facilities well-mapped. The IDF Air Force promptly started shelling the underground facilities. Air attacks first targeted tunnels’ entryways and exits, and later, apparently using American-made bunker-busting bombs, destroyed the tunnels, burying everything in them.

    IDF sources are careful to say they’re still assessing the damage. Yet they hold out the hope that the Friday morning attack will prove to be a major “game changer” with a lasting effect on Hamas’s ability to attack Israel in the future.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

    As long as we’re on the Israel-Hamas contretemps, here are a few more nuggets on the subject:

  • “Hamas attacks on Israel divide Democrats“:

    What do Chuck Schumer, Robert Menendez, and Stenny Hoyer have in common? At least two things. First, all three are Democrats who support Israel’s right to defend itself against the missile attacks launched by Hamas.

    Second, all three are at least 67 years old. Schumer is 70, Menendez 67, and Hoyer 81.

    Israel’s support from Democratic lawmakers is largely confined to old-timers. The new generation of congressional Dems is either ambivalent about Israel or, like the Squad, openly hostile to the Jewish State.

    The Washington Post reports that “a new crop of younger lawmakers willing to challenge the party’s pro-Israel orthodoxy has put pressure on the Biden administration and congressional leaders amid polling showing growing skepticism among Democrats about Israeli actions.”

    What polling data?

    A Gallup poll in March found that the majority of Democrats now take the position that the United States should be applying more pressure to Israel to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The 53 percent opting for more pressure on the Israelis is up from 43 percent in 2018 and no more than 38 percent in the decade before that, marking a substantive change in Democrats’ perspective on U.S. policy,” the report found.

    This shift in opinion among Democrats is reflected in Congress. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, says:

    Congress is beginning to reflect the demographic changes in how the public views [the] Israeli-Palestinian issue. You’re seeing a much more diverse group on the Democratic side who reflect where the base of the Democratic Party is going from Black and Latino to young people and professional women. Their attitudes in polls are radically different than White middle-class Americans.

    If one adds the many rank-and-file Democrats who still support Israel to the majority of Republicans who do, it adds up to a clear preference for the Israeli side of the conflict, rather than for the Hamas/Palestinian side. So this is a winning issue for the GOP, and probably will remain so for a good while.

    The Democratic Party is now driven by victimhood identity politics, and Palestinians seem to make great victims no matter how many terror rockets they launch at civilians. Meanwhile, Jews (like Asians) have been retconned into being “super white” so those on the left can have an excuse to hate them…

  • An Israeli strike hit an office building in Gaza that housed both Hamas and the Associated Press. So they hit a building housing a small cadre of anti-American radicals. And also Hamas…
  • LinkSwarm for May 14, 2021

    Friday, May 14th, 2021

    The Biden Recession blooms, Bibby bombs, Baltimore burns, inscrutable Flu Manchu somehow infects the vaccinated, and Canada’s institutional religious hostility inflicts its revenge on the pastor that defied them. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Carter Malaise II: Inflation Boogaloo: The core inflation rate is now at 11%. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • If inflation wasn’t enough to remind you of Biden’s reboot of That 70’s Show, how about long gas lines? An east coast gas pipeline was shut down by ransomeware attack launched by a hacking group called DarkSide.

    Rendered with the magic of dyslexia

    We’re actually very fortunate that a for-profit gang carried out this hack, rather than a terrorist group or state actor.

  • “South Carolina Follows Montana In Ending All Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Programs.” Strange how the government paying people not to work hurts jobs numbers…
  • Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (WV) says he’s not going to let the Democrats’ election-theft bill pass. Good for him. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Seeing some reports stating that Israeli ground forces entered Gaza, but seeing some Twitter commentary that, no, they haven’t entered, but that IDF artillery and tanks are pounding Hamas tunnels.
  • Why won’t those violent Israelis just let themselves be killed?

    Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.

    But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?

    This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?

    The judgement and treatment of Israel by a double standard is one of the most disturbing facets of global politics in the 21st century. That double standard has been glaringly evident over the past few days. Israel is now the only country on Earth that is expected to allow itself to be attacked. To sit back and do nothing as its citizens are pelted with rocks or rockets. How else do we explain so many people’s unwillingness to place the current events in any kind of context, including the context of an avowedly anti-Semitic Islamist movement – Hamas – firing hundreds of missiles into civilian areas in Israel? In this context, to rage solely against Israel, to curse its people and burn its flag because it has sent missiles to destroy Hamas’s firing positions in Gaza, is essentially to say: ‘Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?’

  • Hamas is the instrument of Iran’s proxy war against Israel:

    Last year, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admitted for the first time that his country was supplying the Palestinian terrorist groups with weapons. “Iran realized Palestinian fighters’ only problem was lack of access to weapons,” Khamenei said in an online speech.

    “With divine guidance and assistance, we planned, and the balance of power has been transformed in Palestine, and today the Gaza Strip can stand against the aggression of the Zionist enemy and defeat it.”

    Khamenei went on to offer the reason why Iran was sending rockets, missiles and tons of explosives to the Gaza Strip: “The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous tumor in the region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”

    Khamenei’s admission shows how the mullahs in Tehran have been lying to the West for many years. In 2011, Mohammad Khazaee, the Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations, sent a letter to the President of the United Nations Security Council in which he vehemently denied that Iran was smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip.

    

  • Baltimore was one of the first cities to try “de-policing.” How did that work out for it? Not so hot:

    This experiment has been an abject failure. Since 2011, nearly 3,000 Baltimoreans have been murdered—one of every 200 city residents over that period. The annual homicide rate has climbed from 31 per 100,000 residents to 56—ten times the national rate. And 93 percent of the homicide victims of known race over this period were black.

    Remarkably, Baltimore is reinforcing its de-policing strategy. State’s Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby no longer intends to prosecute various “low-level” crimes. Newly elected mayor Brandon Scott promises a five-year plan to cut the police budget. Both justify their policies by asserting that the bloodbath on city streets proves that policing itself “hasn’t worked”; they sell their acceleration of de-policing as a “fresh approach” and “re-imagining” of law enforcement.

    The tried “broken windows” policing without understanding it:

    The motivation for de-policing traces to the city’s botched response to an earlier crime epidemic in the 1990s, when it averaged 45 homicides per 100,000 population, up 55 percent from the previous decade. So in 1999 Baltimoreans elected a mayor, Martin O’Malley, who promised to apply New York’s successful crime-fighting approach, where homicides had plunged by two-thirds over the decade (to one-ninth Baltimore’s rate) thanks to an expanded police force and innovative, proactive policing strategies.

    O’Malley’s first commissioner, NYPD veteran Ed Norris, initially showed promise. By 2002, Baltimore’s homicide rate was 20 percent below its 1999 level. As O’Malley pressed for more, however, relations soured, and Norris departed (and some financial shenanigans eventually earned him a stint in federal prison). His successor, Kevin Clark, another NYPD import, also became embroiled in personal and professional controversy; he was fired and succeeded by a Baltimore PD holdover. By the time O’Malley moved to the Maryland governor’s mansion in 2007, Baltimore’s homicide rate was back to its 1990s average.

    The problem was not just turmoil among BPD leadership and meddling (or worse) by O’Malley, but a fatal misunderstanding of what had worked in New York. There, the broad spectrum of criminal activity was addressed efficiently and with community engagement. Detailed data helped guide resources to crime hot spots. Chief William J. Bratton implemented the Broken Windows theory-inspired community-policing methods pioneered by social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, who understood how small manifestations of disorder could grow to larger ones. Minor offenses that made residents feel unsafe or hinted at acceptance of violence were addressed in order to improve quality of life, strengthen communities, and prevent serious crime.

    In Baltimore, however, Broken Windows was misunderstood and misapplied. It mutated into a malignant variant, “zero tolerance” policing—and BPD conduct became not just intolerant but unfocused and excessive. As David Simon, a veteran Baltimore crime reporter and creator of HBO’s The Wire, summed things up, O’Malley “tossed the Fourth Amendment out a window and began using the police department to sweep the corners and rowhouse stoops and [per Norris] ‘lock up damn near everyone.’” That sometimes even included Wire crew members on their way home from a long day of filming.

    True Broken Windows policing, in Kelling’s words, creates “a negotiated sense of order in a community” and involves collaboration between cops and residents. As one BPD vet put it, “You go to a community—before we come in, [we should ask], ‘What are the main things you all can’t stand?’ Everybody playing music at 11:30 at night, kids sitting on the corner, the prostitutes using the little park over there to work their trade. Now, ‘What don’t you care about?’ See the old guys sitting down at the corner playing cards every night? They could stay there all they want. . . . Then the police come in and do what the neighborhood wants. You just don’t go out and lock everybody up.” But, he concluded, “we went overboard.”

    Then they adjusted:

    O’Malley’s successor, Sheila Dixon (the city’s first female and third black mayor), defied her staff’s recommendations and named as commissioner Frederick Bealefeld, a BPD lifer with no college pedigree. “It was something in my gut that felt he was the best person,” Dixon explained. “I could just feel his passion.”

    Bealefeld understood community policing better than the New York imports, addressing disorder and crime efficiently. He attended community meetings tirelessly to find out what residents wanted done; got cops out of their cars and walking patrols more often; invested in better training; and supported cops’ work with kids. Partnering with a savvy federal prosecutor, Rod Rosenstein, he targeted known dealers and shooters, emphasizing quality arrests—including of cops on the take. It worked. Even as arrest totals fell (to 70,000 by 2010), so did the homicide rate, to a low of 31 per 100,000 residents by 2011.

    And then the Social Justice started:

    Dixon had embezzled gift cards meant for the poor—petty corruption is a Baltimore tradition—and in 2010 was succeeded by Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The Oberlin-educated former public defender was more liberal than Dixon, personally lukewarm to Bealefeld, and sympathetic to those embittered by O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” policies. And she faced budget problems. De-policing, then, seemed to tick all the right boxes—and, with the homicide rate at a 23-year low (though still almost seven times the national average), there would be little outcry against it.

    First came some defunding, with a 2 percent pay cut to help address a recession-related budget pinch; cops’ contributions to their pension funds also were raised to help address shortfalls there. The new mayor’s first proposed budget actually cut the BPD’s request by 10 percent, though the difference eventually was split. Demoralized, experienced cops started retiring in numbers.

    Rawlings-Blake did not replace them, and she trimmed staffed aggressively. BPD budgets had consistently authorized about 3,900 positions through the O’Malley and Dixon years. Rawlings-Blake took that down by 5 percent in her 2012 budget and another 6 percent in 2013. Bealefeld called the cuts “unconscionable” and retired. As he’d told the head of the police union at one point, “you can only beat down your horses for so long before they give up.”

    So even before Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015 and Baltimoreans rioted, the BPD had 460 fewer budgeted “horses” than under Mayor Dixon—with 300 fewer on patrol, conducting investigations, or targeting violent criminals. Not surprisingly, the homicide rate surged 20 percent by 2013. And after the city’s newly elected prosecutor, Mosby, criminally charged six uniformed officers in Gray’s death—though she failed to convict any—proactive policing essentially ceased. The city’s annual body count jumped and has remained tragically high since.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Baltimore’s Soros-backed City State Attorney Marilyn Mosby can’t be bothered to indict antifa rioters, but she can ask the FCC to investigate Tucker Carlson for daring to criticize her.
  • Speaking of defunding the police, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey admits that defunding the police was a huge mistake. If only the rest of the Minneapolis had realized this before all the deaths.
  • “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.”
  • Russia’s robot army is mainly vaporware.
  • Just about everything they told us about transmission vectors for Mao Tze Lung was wrong:

    Bars, gyms and restaurants. Those were just a few settings health experts warned could become hotbeds for COVID-19 spread as states began reopening in the spring and summer of 2020 following the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

    Yet, public data analyzed by ABC News appears to tell a different story. The data from states across the country suggests specific outbreak settings (including bars, gyms, restaurants, nail salons, barbershops and stores — for the full list, see graphic below in story) only accounted for a small percentage, if any, of new outbreaks after the pandemic’s inital wave in 2020.

    Snip.

    Based on ABC News’ analysis of public data of all coronavirus cases in four states and D.C., the outbreak settings accounted for less than 5% of all COVID-19 cases in those states.

  • “World’s Most Vaccinated Nation Sees Active COVID Cases Double In Under A Week.” Mysterious uptick in the Seychelles.
  • Another data point: “Yankees Suffer COVID Resurgence As 8 Fully-Vaccinated Players, Staff Test Positive.” A fluke? Bad batch of vaccines? Bad batch of tests?
  • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  • “Why Did Biden Census Bureau Add 2.5 Million More Residents to Blue-State Population Count?” The question pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it?
  • Kansas’ Republican legislature overrides Democratic governor’s veto of election integrity bill.
  • Texas congressman Chip Roy is running ran against Elise Stefanik for conference chair to replace Liz Cheney. (Oops, he lost, 134-46.)
  • Remember the Polish pastor who kicked police out of his Canadian church? Well, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The State: “Calgary pastor Artur Pawlowski has been arrested for holding a church service.” That will teach him for daring to think Canada has freedom of religion…
  • How we got to the Ever Given. The first container ship only carried 58 boxes. Current container ships can carry as many as 24,000…
  • “Former Democrat Speaker of House in Oregon Arrested for Sex Trafficking.”

    Dave Hunt represented Clackamas County in the Oregon House of Representatives from 2003 through 2013. Hunt was the former Democratic Leader, Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House for the State of Oregon. As a legislator, Hunt the sponsor of a bill criminalizing sex trafficking in 2007. Hunt is currently a lobbyist working to influence the very chamber he left.

    However, even more ironic in 2011, Dave Hunt use his position to support and vote for HB 2714. That bill created the crime of commercial sexual solicitation, the exact crime police used to charge Hunt when he was arrested and cited.

    Sort of sounds like a garden variety prostitution solicitation charge. But if he’s one of the legislators to redefine that as “sex trafficking,” my sympathy is extremely limited.

  • Colorado Democrats give up on their gun control push. (For now.) Good. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • I-40 bridge over Mississippi closed due to a giant crack in a key structural beam.
  • Telsa plans more expansion in Travis County.
  • NRA’s bankruptcy petition has been dismissed. Understandably, since it seemed a transparent ploy to begin with. It’s too bad Wayne LaPierre seems intent on dragging the NRA down with him…
  • Mark Sebu follows up on the Kentucky Ballistics explosion. Evidently it would haven taken 161,520 PI to shear the threads off the Sebu RN 50. Also, there were no pre-cuts on the sabot, suggesting it may indeed have been a counterfeit SLAP round that caused the explosion.
  • Not the Babylon Bee: O.J. Simpson backs Liz Cheney, accuses the Republican Party of “dishonesty.” I don’t feel I can adequately parody this real-life event, even though I should probably take a stab at it…
    

  • Sign you may be in a cult: They keep keep the mummified body of the dead leader in someone’s home, covered by Christmas lights. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Top Gear/Grand Tour presenter James May found out that trickle charging a Tesla S’ main car battery didn’t charge the ordinary car battery, the one responsible for regular electric systems…like unlocking the hood latch to reach the same battery. Result: an hour of work just to reach the dead battery.
  • Speaking of impractical automotive accoutrements, here’s a Bugatti watch with a “working” W16 engine, yours for a mere $280,000…
  • Foamy: “Stop saving the stupid people!”
  • “Disney To Remove Problematic Kiss From Classic Movie, Snow White Will Now Remain Dead.”
  • Pipeline blues:

  • “Damnit! I had two sawbucks on Beatlebaum!”

  • Palestinians Do What They Do Best: Firing Rockets At Israeli Civilians

    Wednesday, May 12th, 2021

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but Palestinians are reigning raining down terror rockets on Israel from Gaza, and Israel is pounding the snot out of Hamas military targets in Gaza in retaliation. “Over 700 rockets fired at Israel since Monday.” “As of early Wednesday morning, three Israeli women were killed in rocket attacks, with 46 injured.”

    Did you know that Gaza doesn’t have bomb shelters?

    So: Same old same old. Except that last year, these attacks actually became rare. There were 90 rockets fired in February of 2020, and then only 43 for the entire rest of the year. Funny how things settled down shortly after we dirtnapped Iranian terrorist mastermind Qassem Suleimani. It may also have had something to do with the Trump Administration’s successful pursuit of the Abraham Accords (with multiple Middle Eastern nations finally making peace with Israel), and even more with their political and economic isolation of Hamas sponsor Iran. But now that Democrats are back in the White House, economic sanctions on Iran have been eased and suddenly things are getting all sploady in Ashkelon again.

    Middle East Peace, Biden Style

    The success of the Abraham Accords was a deep affront to the grandees of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment. Democrats evidently want to be champions of Palestinian victimhood far more than they actually want peace in the Middle East. That, or the very idea of Trump foreign policy successes were simply unbearable to them. Or maybe the Abraham Accords simply weren’t profitable for them. Have we ever had any sort of accounting where all those pallets of money Obama sent to Iran for the nuclear deal ultimately ended up?

    Somehow, somewhere deep within the bowels of Foggy Bottom, a Democratic Party functionary must hear the broadcast reports of sirens going off in Jerusalem and think to himself “Ah, finally all is right with the world again!”