That shameful Austin-Blinken letter to Israel

 I saw this coming a year ago. 

As soon as Israel commenced its response to the horrors of October 7, 2023, I could see the trajectory. In the initial phase, the Biden administration was forthrightly supportive. But I knew that as soon as Israel had to zap some schools and hospitals in Gaza - because the staffs, students and patients in those building were being used as human shields by Hamas, and that's where the weapons caches and operations centers were - the tone from Washington would change. And it followed the same pattern as the US response to previous Israeli responses to Hamas attacks. "Hey, guys, you've sent a proportional message. That's about enough." "Take the win" and such.

The letter that the US Secretaries of State and defense sent to the Israeli government takes this clueless hubris a step further:

On the one hand, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. would be sending an advanced anti-missile system to Israel, along with troops to operate it, to bolster the defense against Iran. On the other hand, Biden has been pressuring Israel into a more limited response to Iran’s second ballistic-missile attack in five months, including publicly opposing an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In the midst of this, Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a joint letter to Israeli officials — promptly released publicly — chastising Israel for not ensuring enough humanitarian aid in Gaza and warning that if Israel does not meet the administration’s demands within 30 days, the U.S. could suspend aid to Israel. Conveniently, this would place the potential aid-suspension date a week after the November 5 election.

In other words, Harris can spend the closing weeks of the presidential election arguing to the pro-Hamas caucus that the administration has put Israel on notice while still claiming to supporters of Israel that no decision has been made to suspend aid.

The substance of the letter places the blame for insufficient aid getting into the hands of Gazans on Israel, claiming that Israelis are creating too many barriers to aid entering the strip. Yet Israel must vet aid going in because Hamas has historically used aid deliveries to smuggle in weapons. Also, Hamas inhibits the flow of aid within Gaza, looting delivery trucks and hoarding food and supplies for their own fighters.

The Austin-Blinken letter also criticizes various steps Israel has taken against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, even though evidence points to employees of UNRWA having participated in the October 7 attacks.

I strive to prevent cynicism from affecting my objectivity, but I think we're on safe ground assuming a connection between the neck-and-neck state of the presidential race in Michigan and the equivocation eroding its support for Israel. 

I spent two nights in Dearborn recently. My wife and I took a road trip to visit the Motown Museum in Detroit. Staff in our hotel, in restaurants, in convenience stores, were nearly to a person of Arab ethnicity. In a hookah lounge where we had an excellent dinner, our server was a young Iraqi woman and the young man tending our hookah was Egyptian. They were personable and on top of their jobs. Indeed, most Dearborn Middle Easterners we dealt with were pretty worldly. Young men and young women interacted on an equal footing and were completely comfortable around each other. 

But if any of them vote next month, I think we can be reasonably sure regarding the party they will push the button for.

And maybe even more than the hip young Arabs of Dearborn, the Democrats are concerned about the votes of the snot-nosed white post-American students at campuses such as UCLA and Columbia. 

It's all so sick. To reiterate some basics, Israel is the only Western nation in the Middle East. It provides the Jerusalem component of the Jerusalem-Athens formulation of the West's development. It is a tech hub. Arabs serve in the Knesset. It has dealt with frequent wars with neighbors since the day of the founding of its iteration as a modern nation-state in 1948. 

The Biden administration's moral preening regarding Gaza aid led to an empty gesture that cost you and me tax dollars when that stupid pier didn't pan out. And stories abound about Hamas highjacking of food-aid trucks.

Let us hope Netanyahu, Gallant et al keep their eyes on victory - in Gaza, up north in Lebanon, and in the overarching menace from Iran - and keep the Biden administration at a healthy distance. 

 

The world's two hottest spots require nerves of steel

 I've written before about how there are parallel phenomena - or perhaps mirror-opposite phenomena works better - on the post-American Right and Left regarding the two currently raging conflicts on the world stage.

The one with Israel at its epicenter, but which involves a considerably wider array of actors, including a malevolent and nearly-nuclear Iran, which is orchestrating a lot of what is happening, has US progressives calling for Israel to stop defending itself. The acceptance of - or at least lack of courage to confront - blatant Jew-hatred among progressives is a major factor.

The Trumpist Right is thumbs-down on supporting a country, Ukraine, that was invaded without provocation by its much bigger neighbor. Devoid of pushback, this move would set a precedent of the erosion of the post-1945 international order. It's about as insular  stance as one could take. Its main champions, such as JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, couch their argument in zero-sum terms, saying that sending missile-defense systems and fighter jets siphons off resources needed to protect the southern US border. The movement's Dear Leader, the Very Stable Genius, says that his charm and vision could convince Putin and Zelensky to reach a reasonable settlement within a day.

Actually, the current administration in Washington is calibrating its actual support in each case, rhetoric about resolute victory notwithstanding.

With regard to the Mideast, Antony Blinken continues to search for a workable ceasefire deal, even though Hamas has not sent a representative to the latest round of talks in Doha and Cairo. He even still speaks of a two-state objective. He and the administration he works for are trying to lean on Israel to keep the northern front of the multi-pronged jihadist threat from spiraling out of control.

It seems that ship has sailed:

The Biden administration may be encountering the limits of its ability to keep a lid on the looming hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah. The U.S. has had a number of naval assets parked off the coast of the Levant for months in an effort to deter Iran and its proxies — an exercise that has succeeded only in limiting exchanges of fire between the terrorist cadre and the IDF. But the outright confrontation the White House hoped to forestall may not be preventable for much longer.

“The only way left to return the residents of the north to their homes is via military action,” Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters on Monday. Gallant added that he had relayed the same message to his American counterpart, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Indeed, military action may be the only way for Israel to reclaim the territory in the country’s north that tens of thousands of its citizens evacuated shortly after the October 7 massacre and to which they have not yet been able to return. Joe Biden’s efforts to craft a cease-fire deal that would restore temporary calm to the region have all been rejected by Hamas, and as the New York Times wrote, summarizing remarks attributable to one of Gallant’s aides, Hezbollah “has decided to ‘tie itself’ to Hamas.” The time for half measures is coming to an end.

The risks of such an operation will be significant, and no president would want to court them in the absence of a viable alternative. Hezbollah has an arsenal of about 150,000 rockets and missiles, according to Israeli estimates, and it can field between 40,000 and 50,000 fighters. The Justice Department has previously identified alleged Hezbollah agentsoperating inside the U.S., and it was only last week that the DOJ charged a Pakistani national in connection with Iran’s reported interest in assassinating “a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil.”

To call what seems likely to happen Gaza redux doesn't quite convey the military power Hezbollah can unleash. 

Then there is the Iran factor. Hezbollah has a stronger ideological tie to Iran than that of Hamas. Not to mention that Iran is where those 150,000 rockets and missiles came from.

Iran is also a break-out state regarding you-know-what:

Its stock of enriched uranium, which was capped at 202.8 kg under the deal, stood at 5.5 tonnes in February, according to the latest quarterly report by the U.N. nuclear watchdog that inspects Iran's enrichment plants.

Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency's theoretical definition.

And now there's a development involving the country that figures into both of the hot-spot situations: Russia:

The US and UK are concerned that Russia has been helping Iran develop its nuclear weapons program in exchange for the recent delivery of ballistic missiles it was provided by Tehran for use in its war against Ukraine, according to a report Saturday that cited sources familiar with the matter.

The issue of deepening ties between Russia and Iran was a matter of concern during meetings between US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Washington, DC, on Friday, as well as during talks between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy earlier in the week.

According to the Guardian newspaper, however, the two countries aren’t just focused on the ballistic missiles supplied to Russia by Iran, but are also concerned about what Russia may provide in return.

Citing British sources familiar with the high-level talks last week, the news outlet reported that the two countries believe Iran may be working with experienced Russian specialists to streamline its manufacturing process as it grows its stockpile of enriched uranium and prepares to make its own nuclear weapons.

In Ukraine, President Zelensky is cajoling, pleading and shouting at the West to allow Ukraine to fire Western-supplied long-range missiles at targets deep inside Russia. He seems to be getting Western leaders to take him seriously, but not enough to seal the deal:

Ukraine's hopes of being allowed to use Western-supplied long range missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory were put on hold once again on Sept. 13, after the leaders of the U.S. and U.K. stopped short of making the announcement Kyiv wanted.

Anticipation had been high ahead of meetings between President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Washington, but the White House dampened expectations even before the pair had finished talks.

"There is no change to our view on the provision of long-range strike capabilities for Ukraine to use inside of Russia," National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.

Ukraine was hoping for permission to use two Western-supplied long range missiles that it already possesses to strike military targets such as airfields located deep inside Russian territory.

With the bans in place, Kyiv says it cannot effectively defend Ukrainian cities from intensifying aerial attacks.

The two missiles are the U.S.-supplied ATACMS, a short-range supersonic tactical ballistic missile, and the U.K.-France-supplied Storm Shadow.

Both Storm Shadows and ATACMS were initially given to Kyiv on the provision that they only be used to strike Russian targets within Ukraine or in Russian-occupied parts of the country.

Western fears of escalating the war with Russia have been behind the restrictions.

Germany is saying outright that it won't even send the requisite missiles:

While Washington and London are facing pressure to allow Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia using the Western-made missiles already in the country, Berlin declines to even provide such missiles.

“Germany has made a clear decision about what we will do and what we will not do. This decision will not change,” Scholz said on Sept. 13, remaining adamant in his refusal to provide the country’s Taurus long-range missiles to Ukraine.

His remarks came after U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmerstopped short of lifting restrictions on using Western-supplied long-range weapons on Russian soil during their meeting in Washington.

In the spring, Washington confirmed that it had begun providing Ukraine with long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). Kyiv had previously received missiles that could travel up to 160 kilometers, and the new batch consisted of advanced ones with a range of up to 300 kilometers.

But Berlin's transfer of Taurus missiles did not follow.

Prior, Germany followed the U.S. lead in handing over the first Patriot air defense system in early 2023 and the long-anticipated battle tanks.

When Kyiv launched a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk Oblast, the operation received endorsement from Berlin. Germany’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine is “free to choose” the weapons to use inside Russia for self-defense in compliance with international law.

Yet, Berlin continues to hold off Ukrainian requests to provide the last piece of the puzzle, the missiles that can target the Russian military in the rear.

"A nightmare scenario for Scholz is that Ukraine would use Taurus to strike politically sensitive targets inside Russia. Scholz fears that this could escalate the war and throw Germany into direct hostilities with Russia," Fabian Hoffmann, doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, who specializes in missile technology, told the Kyiv Independent earlier this spring.

“Fundamentally, this means that Scholz is restrained by a lack of political will, which stems from a lack of trust in Ukrainian leadership to not break any promises.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that Germany’s refusal to provide Ukraine with long-range missiles is linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin's nuclear saber-rattling.

“As I understand it, the chancellor says that Germany is not a nuclear state and that this (Taurus missiles) is the most powerful weapon system in Germany,” Ukraine’s president said in an interview with Bild.

The hesitancy to allow these Western allies to achieve total victory as quickly as possible is not without reasonableness. We've all seen the photos and videos of nuclear weapon tests, and even their use in a war situation, in August 1945. Humankind has imposed on itself an apocalyptic set of considerations from which there is no going back.

But this raises a basic question which humankind has always had to deal: Is the cost of doing what's right ever too high?

It's obviously the right thing to do to give both Israel and Ukraine what they need to defeat their enemies resolutely and in a minimum amount of time. The West could provide them what they need to do it. Right away. 

But how sure can we be that either the Putin-Medvedev regime or the theocracy in Tehran would find, not even a moral compass, but the degree of reason needed to see that an uninhabitable world is only hours away from the use of the unthinkable?

So what is to be done? Do we tolerate absolute evil, let precedents for unprovoked aggression be set, and accept a certain level of moral murkiness, just to keep the whole thing from being reduced to ashes?

Is not the correct answer of the same cloth as the firefighter who goes back into the house one more time before its burning frame collapses, in order to rescue a baby or pet?

Is not the eternal record book going to show that justice, love, and defense of life prevailed even as darkness covered the fallen world?

A lot of layers to this beyond military capability specs or political considerations. This gets to the thorniest dilemma those of our species ever face.

How will we proceed?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday roundup

 At the Kyiv Independent, Khrystia Vengryniuk looks into reasons why Ukrainians don't grow up learning about their own literature as much as that from other countries, in a piece titled ""The Heavy Weight of Ukrainian Culture":

“Everything in Ukraine is about pain, tears, serfdom, and wars. Of course, children don’t want to read such literature.” I still remember this conversation from back in school when the math teacher was trying to explain to the literature teacher why her class wasn’t preparing for their lessons.

“But that’s how it really was throughout Ukraine’s history,” the surprised literature teacher replied.

“If it was like that, then it’s no wonder they don’t want to read. I myself couldn’t handle so much negativity. In foreign literature, there are adventures: Mowgli, Gulliver, Tom Sawyer. Personally, I don’t know Ukrainian literature well. We studied Russian literature in school, which included ‘The Garnet Bracelet,’ ‘The Master and Margarita,’ and even ‘War and Peace,’ which is about war too, but it’s interesting. For some reason, Russian literature isn’t as sad as ours. Wasn’t it like that for them?”

“It wasn’t,” the literature teacher replied.

“Well, that still needs to be verified,” the math teacher dismissed.

I witnessed this conversation while staying after class to work on algebra, as I was struggling with it while preparing to enter university. I knew the math teacher was wrong, and even then, it was hurtful to hear all this. I had heard similar complaints and accusations about the sadness and heaviness of Ukrainian literature and the entirety of Ukrainian culture throughout my life. 

With the full-scale invasion, there was no need to prove anything to Ukrainian Russophiles about our history or culture. Either there’s now more information about how things were, or the number of Russophiles is finally decreasing. It’s just unfortunate that many admirers of the “great” Russian culture had to see missiles destroying their homes to rid themselves of this obsession.

While preparing to enter the philology faculty with a focus on Ukrainian literature, I began to learn more about this “heavy Ukrainian culture,” about things we hadn’t even touched upon in school. After studying the literature of World War I, the Holodomor in Ukraine – which left me in a state of shock and insomnia – and World War II, I was convinced that the 1960s and 1970s would be a time of enlightenment and rebuilding, as that was when my parents were born. 

I thought about how close that was to me in time. But then, just before the Ukrainian literature exam, I read a sentence that still hangs over my consciousness when I think about the “heavy Ukrainian culture”: “The artist Alla Horska was killed with a hammer to the head for her pro-Ukrainian stance.” 

This is what the Soviet authorities did up until our independence to everyone who didn’t conform to their inhumane policies, slanders, and crimes. During that same period, the poet Vasyl Symonenko was beaten to death, and the writer Vasyl Stus was imprisoned, where he died after years of torture and inhumane conditions.

This happened to everyone who did not submit, bend the knee, keep silent, or side with the oppressors. A year ago, my fellow writers and I wrote a children’s book, “Light Catchers” about the most famous Ukrainian artists of all time, and we spent hours debating how to present all the factual information about the artists in a way that would not traumatize children, because 80% of the artists suffered from Russian atrocities.

Having entered university and started studying Ukrainian literature, I thought that with Ukraine’s independence, the gates of pain were closing, that this was a free Ukraine, and no one would ever be able to do such things to our artists or any Ukrainian again. This is the civilized modern world, after all. What persecution, heaven forbid, war, could we possibly talk about in the very heart of Europe? After all, our oppressors had long since died — we were left to build a free culture in a free country.

And, indeed, there was a period of flourishing in the 1990s, but with Russia again bearing down in Ukraine, the older zeitgeist seems to be prevailing again.

At Public Discourse, Ivana Greco asks, "When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We lose?" 

n thinking about this problem, we might consider some lessons from The Odyssey, one of humanity’s oldest stories, about a warrior’s twenty-year quest through countless dangers to return home to his wife and child. At the end of the epic, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, is trying to determine his identity since she does not immediately recognize him after his long absence. She asks her servant to move their marriage bed outside the bedroom so Odysseus can sleep in it. Odysseus responds that moving the bed is impossible since he personally built the bed into the trunk of an old olive tree: “My handiwork and no one else’s!” He explains that when their house was built: “I laid out our bedroom round that tree, lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof, gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors.”  After cutting off the trees leaves and branches, he “hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up into a bed post, drilled it, let it serve as model” for the other bedposts, and he “planed them all, inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory and stretched a bed between.” Then, reunited with his wife, the epic tells us:

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache

Of longing mounted, and he wept at last,

his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,

longed for

As the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer

spent in rough water where his ship went down

under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea.

Would we be as moved by this scene of a husband and wife coming back together after a twenty-year separation, but with an Ikea bed assembled by someone paid $15/hour from the TaskRabbit app as the central reference point? I think not. Efficiency is good, but it is not the most important thing. When it comes to making a home, there are other virtues that matter far more.

Aaron Renn has been getting more bracing in his commentary of late. (I discussed this in a recent post over at Precipice.) Today, he offers up a real upside-the-head at his Substack. He says we are moving even beyond his positive-neutral-negative formulation for how the culture relates to Christianity. He says we're seeing four civilizational shifts: from Christian to post-Christian, classical liberalism to Nietzchean nihilism, global West to global East, and Enlightenment rationalism to post-Enlightenment enchantment. The three reasons these shifts matter are that "these realities are going to be the context of discipleship for our children," the need for a new approach to missions, and "these changes will challenge our collective sense of identity":

Faithfulness to the gospel may increasingly put our political geographic citizenship in tension with our spiritual citizenship in heaven. We are kingdom people first. If the West (read: the United States) becomes increasingly seen as the source of the spiritual problem, then we may have to orient ourselves at home as missionaries have been doing over the course of the past decades. We're going to have to develop a greater sensitivity to our Western and Enlightenment accommodation of the gospel.

The American evangelical church is ill-prepared for adapting to these shifts. The likelihood is that under sustained cultural pressure, it will resort to doubling-down on past approaches, wearing an anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, populist-fundamentalist resistance as a badge of honor. This is the equivalent of being in a foreign country and talking louder and slower. This will only serve to further marginalize the American evangelical church's impact in the ongoing cultural conversation. By spiritualizing their resistance and demonizing the other, they will further the degree of polarization and potential for any meaningful impact.

We are as a Western Christian church at an historic inflection point. We are at a point of decision.  To meet our moment, we will need the courage to face these realities, the humility to seek God's leading, and the discernment to balance innovation with historic orthodoxy.

In "Why Israel's Critics Stopped Pretending To Want a Ceasefire" at Commentary, Seth Mandel makes the point that Hamas has no reason to not comment to the table, other than that it doesn't want any "peace" other than the obliteration of Israel:

Without any credible way to absolve Hamas of blame for the lack of a deal, the terms must change. The protesters, their supporters in the Squad faction of Congress, their mentors at “elite” universities—by and large these folks merely want Israel’s defeat, whatever the specific methods.

Of course, if they really wanted a ceasefire, they would have been horrified by October 7 and angry at Hamas, since there was a ceasefire in place that Hamas broke by slaughtering over a thousand innocents, ensuring there’d be a significant response. To a true ceasefire supporter, let alone a person of any moral fiber, Hamas’s attack would have been the great unforgivable crime of the century.

But the rallies in support of Hamas by progressive groups and on campuses began immediately after the massacre. Not only were these groups willing to forgive Hamas for destroying a status quo ceasefire, many of them were downright jubilant at the death and destruction caused by the terror group.

Since it’s never actually been about a ceasefire, it has been easy for the “pro-Gaza” protest movement to pivot in its demands. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ringleader of the Democratic anti-Zionist caucus who has long demanded that the U.S. go far beyond a ceasefire and take action against Israel, had a prime speaking slot at Harris’s nominating convention last night.

There’s some value, of course, in all this dropping of pretensions. The Democratic Party with Harris as its standard-bearer is telegraphing a posture change; some in the party, such as Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, are hinting that such a shift could come sooner than later. It turns out that all it might take for Israel’s critics to drop the “ceasefire” charade is an actual ceasefire.

I've been busy over at Precipice.

In "A Bit About the Geological Makeup of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain," I discuss the primacy of cultivating virtue.

In "The Two-to-Tango Adage Seems Applicable," I cover similar terrain to that covered by Mandel. Namely, that, for all the clamor worldwide, including in Israel, for a deal that will get the hostages released, Hamas ain't at the table for the current round of talks.

I indulged the historian in me with "The Two Great Northern Migrations of the Early 20th Century." One of the migrations gave us country music, one gave us the blues, and both provided a steady stream of factory workers. 

 

 

No filter between that brain and that mouth

 The Very Stable Genius has always had this problem, but it seems to be getting more acute of late.

He tries for a little Borscht Belt humor at a moment when solemnity was called for:

Near the start of his speech at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, Donald Trump spoke about Corey Comperatore, who was killed in the shooting at the former president’s campaign rally last month. 

Trump held a moment of silence for Comperatore, whom he called "a hero to all of us." Yet even as he honored the late firefighter, Trump appeared to make an off-the-cuff quip while talking about his widow’s grief.

The GOP presidential nominee told the crowd that a friend of his had given Comperatore's family a $1 million check, and he also made reference to money donated to the family's GoFundMe. 

"But you know what? Corey's wife said, 'I'd rather have my husband,'” Trump said.

“Isn’t that good? I know a lot of wives that would not say that — I’m sorry," he continued, as the crowd laughed. "They would not say that."

He makes a ha-ha for the drool-besotted minions at the expense of a Senate candidate's physical appearance:

“I don’t speak badly about somebody’s physical disability,” Trump spewed this go-round, referring to Montana’s senior Democratic senator [Jon Tester] who is up again for reelection.

“But he’s got the biggest stomach I have ever seen. I swear, I swear. That’s the biggest stomach – I have never seen a stomach like that!”

Again, it wasn’t the most pathetic moment.

“Stomach brimming out like a big slob!” Trump further mocked, until introducing on stage the disgraced former military White House physician-turned-Texas Congressman Ronny Jackson, who immediately likened Tester, who controls the Pentagon’s purse strings, to a “hippopotamus.”

He really gets unhinged over Josh Shapiro, a centrist governor, and gets pretty damn grandiose about his legacy regarding Israel:

The former president took aim at the Pennsylvania Democrat on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, after Shapiro delivered a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Trump said: "The highly overrated Jewish Governor of the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, made a really bad and poorly delivered speech talking about freedom and fighting for Comrade Kamala Harris for President, yet she hates Israel and will do nothing but make its journey through the complexities of survival as difficult as possible, hoping in the end that it will fail.

"Judge only by her actions!"

Trump added: "Yet Shapiro, for strictly political reasons, refused to acknowledge that I am the best friend that Israel, and the Jewish people, ever had. I have done more for Israel than any President, and frankly, I have done more for Israel than any person, and it's not even close.

"Shapiro has done nothing for Israel, and never will. Comrade Kamala Harris, the Radical Left Marxist who stole the nomination from Crooked Joe, will do even less. Israel is in BIG trouble!" 

Got that? Any other person. Moses. David. Theodor Herzl. Gold Meir. All second-raters in the VSG's estimation. 

But this one is the most disturbing. He's basically saying that anybody who chooses to stand in the way of his ambitions is properly an object of hate:

DONALD TRUMP HAS NO PLANS TO HEED the advice of his aides and limit himself to policy contrasts when he debates Kamala Harris. He wants to make it personal.

“This is just the way I am. I hate my opponent. I hate my opponents,” Trump told a confidant who advised the former president to consider backing away from calling the vice president “stupid” or “dumb” at their high-profile standoff in a few weeks, which he has done repeatedly.

Trump explained to the confidant that he’s treating Harris the same way he did Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. “Hillary, Joe, Kamala. It doesn’t matter. I just hate them.”

To another adviser, Trump was blunt about taking on Harris: “I’m going to be mean.”

Any spokesperson for any Christian denomination, organization or publication who dares to attempt justifying this instantly forfeits all credibility.

 This is an eight-year-old in a septuagenarian's body. He is unfit for any role in public life, let alone the presidency.

Stay home in November, post-America. 

 

 

 

Once in a while, something goes right in this world

 This:

Israeli forces rescued four hostages held by Hamas since October in a raid in Gaza on Saturday that Palestinian officials said killed more than 200 people, one of the single bloodiest Israeli assaults of the eight-month-old war.

The hostage rescue operation and an intense accompanying air assault took place in central Gaza's al-Nuseirat, a densely built-up and often embattled area in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian territory's ruling Islamist group.

The Times of Israel called it 

one of the most daring, complex, high-risk yet successful operations amid the war against Hamas, rescuing four hostages alive from the terror group’s captivity in the Gaza Strip. The mission was conducted in broad daylight and in an area where Israeli forces had not previously operated.

About civilian misfortune, the IDF had this to say:

The IDF acknowledged that it killed Palestinian civilians amid the fighting, but it placed the blame on Hamas for holding hostages and fighting in a dense civilian environment.

“We know about under 100 [Palestinian] casualties. I don’t know how many of them are terrorists,” IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a briefing with journalists, reported by Reuters.

Yeah, it behooves us to cast a gimlet eye on Hamas-supplied figures:

The proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appears to have declined sharply, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data has found, a trend that both coincides with Israel’s changing battlefield tactics and contradicts the ministry’s own public statements.

The trend is significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties in one of the 21st century’s most destructive conflicts. In October, when the war began, it was above 60%. For the month of April, it was below 40%. Yet the shift went unnoticed for months by the U.N. and much of the media, and the Hamas-linked Health Ministry has made no effort to set the record straight.

But it's not like there are a lot of unopinionated people in Gaza:

Palestinian support for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza remains high, according to a Palestinian poll released on March 20. That support has increased since the Iran-backed terrorist group attacked Israel on October 7. The poll, published by the Ramallah-based non-profit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, also indicates that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his faction have grown even more unpopular since the war in Gaza started.

I'll reiterate: all this agony could come to an end yet this afternoon if Hamas would do two things: release the hostages and dismantle itself. 

 

 

 

Israel is a litmus test of the world's capability of moral clarity; it's failing badly

 There's the International Criminal Court's moral-equivalency framing in its intent to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli defense minister Gallant. Oh, yes, it also wants to arrest Yahya Sinwar and other Hamas leaders, Ain't that nice?

And now there's this:

 Norway, Ireland and Spain said on Wednesday they are recognizing a Palestinian state, in a historic but largely symbolic move that deepens Israel’s isolation more than seven months into its grinding war against Hamas in Gaza.

 . . . Israel recalled its ambassadors to the three countries and summoned their envoys, accusing the Europeans of rewarding the militant Hamas group for its Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war.

Netanyahu's government, which is opposed to Palestinian statehood, says the conflict can only be resolved through direct negotiations, which last collapsed over 15 years ago.

As if to underline the point, Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir paid a provocative visit Wednesday to a flashpoint holy site in Jerusalem sacred to Jews and Muslims in a move that could escalate tensions across the region.

Ben-Gvir said the visit was a response to the move by the three European countries. “We will not even allow a statement about a Palestinian state,” he said. The Al-Aqsa mosque compound is the third holiest site in Islam, and the hilltop on which it stands is the holiest site for Jews, who refer to it as the Temple Mount.

With their formal recognition, planned for May 28, the three countries will join some 140 — more than two-thirds of the United Nations — that have recognized the state of Palestine over the years. The United States and Britain, among others, have backed the idea of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel but say it should come as part of a negotiated settlement.

The announcements from Europe came in a swift cascade. Norway, which helped broker the Oslo accords that kicked off the peace process in the 1990s, was the first to announce its decision, with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre saying “there cannot be peace in the Middle East if there is no recognition.”

Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris called it an “historic and important day for Ireland and for Palestine,” saying the announcements had been coordinated and that other countries might join “in the weeks ahead.”

The international community has long viewed the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as the only realistic way to resolve the conflict, and in past weeks several European Union countries have indicated they plan to recognize a Palestinian state to further those efforts.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who announced his country's decision before parliament, has spent months touring European and Middle Eastern countries to garner support for recognition, as well as for a possible cease-fire in Gaza.

“This recognition is not against anyone, it is not against the Israeli people,” Sánchez said. “It is an act in favor of peace, justice and moral consistency.” He said it was clear that Netanyahu “does not have a project for peace,” while acknowledging that “the fight against the terrorist group Hamas is legitimate.”

Israel's government harshly condemned the decision taken by the three countries. Foreign Minister Israel Katz recalled Israel's ambassadors and summoned the three countries' envoys in Israel. He said they would watch grisly video footage of the Oct. 7 attack.

“History will remember that Spain, Norway, and Ireland decided to award a gold medal to Hamas murderers and rapists," he said. He also said the announcement would undermine talks aimed at a cease-fire and hostage release in Gaza that came to a standstill earlier this month.

President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, welcomed the moves toward recognition, saying they would contribute to efforts to bring about a two-state solution.

Mahmoud Abbas. Would that be the guy who won one election for a six-year term as head of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank decades ago and has held the office ever since?

And, excuse me for bringing up an awkward subject, but all talk of a two-state solution is pretty ephemeral without some universally agreed-upon parties agreeing to borders for a Palestinian state, as well as what kinds of government for such a state the international community would not find acceptable. 

We've been down that road - in 1937, with the Peel Commission, in 1947, with the UN proposal, and the 1990s attempts at it: the Oslo Accords (which were closely followed by the Second Intifada) and the sight, indelibly etched in the national memory, of Madeleine Albright chasing Yasser Arafat down the hall in her high heels, imploring him to return to the negotiating room to hear the very latest idea on the matter. 

And now this:

Egyptian intelligence quietly changed the terms of a ceasefire proposal that Israel had already signed off on earlier this month, ultimately scuttling a deal that could have released Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and set a pathway to temporarily end the fighting in Gaza, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

The ceasefire agreement that Hamas ended up announcing on May 6 was not what the Qataris or the Americans believed had been submitted to Hamas for a potential final review, the sources said.

The changes made by Egyptian intelligence, the details of which have not been previously reported, led to a wave of anger and recrimination among officials from the US, Qatar and Israel, and left ceasefire talks at an impasse.

“We were all duped,” one of those sources told CNN.

Can we please stop talking about "achieving a lasting peace?" There's going to be maximum tension in the Middle East, occasionally erupting into hot wars of varying degrees of peril to the world at large, until there's general recognition, among all the types of nations in the world, of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish representative democracy.  

History will not look kindly on Biden's treatment of Israel

 The president's pause in shipment of a new round of munitions for Israel betrays one of the United States's closest allies and ups the imperiling of the West to a new level.

As is often the case when someone is trying to morally justify an untenable position, in his interview with CNN's Erin Burnett, he pretty much acknowledged -whether he meant to or not - that he knows the bombs in question will achieve the very aim Israel is pursuing:

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an exclusive interview on “Erin Burnett OutFront,” referring to 2,000-pound bombs that Biden paused shipments of last week.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden said.

The president’s announcement that he was prepared to condition American weaponry on Israel’s actions amounts to a turning point in the seven-month conflict between Israel and Hamas. And his acknowledgement that American bombs had been used to kill civilians in Gaza was a stark recognition of the United States’ role in the war.

Biden - and the peaceniks and antinomians with a morbid fascination with jihad with whom he's trying to curry favor - act like the IDF gives no attention to the effectiveness of its strikes, that it gives no thought to collateral damage.

Actually, the held-up munitions are the most advance way to achieve the aim with minimal impact on civilian life:

Last week, the administration’s line was that it needed to see a plausible evacuation plan from Rafah—a statement indicating that it still supported the overall aim of eliminating Hamas and that the problem going forward was primarily logistical. So that might simply have been a lie. It’s no secret Biden doesn’t want Israel to conduct a full-scale war operation in Rafah, but the administration made it sound as though that was entirely on humanitarian grounds.

But if his primary aim is to limit civilian casualties, his methods of doing so are insane. The munitions he is holding back would in part allow Israel to hit sites and areas in Rafah with great precision. That is how you limit casualties. Which leads me to believe that Joe Biden is literally trying to freeze the conflict in place permanently—for his own reasons. Those reasons are bad, and stupid, and feckless, and self-defeating. For Israel cannot stop the war. It can’t. If it does, Hamas wins—at which point Israel will begin a new period of mortal peril perhaps more threatening to its future than any period in its past. The Israeli public will not stand for it. Because of what Biden is doing, the war will be bloodier and more costly for both sides, and will take much longer. How on earth will that help him?

Think about what kind of cackling and rubbing together of hands is going on in the inner governmental chambers of Iran, Russia, China and North Korea. The debacle at the Kabul airport in August 2021gave our foes a strong signal that Biden had no consistent foreign policy vision. This seals the deal.

And the shipment of bombs and ammunition had already been approved by Congress. How is this different from Trump holding up aid to Ukraine in an attempt to motivate Zelensky to dig up dirt on Biden (a move the got him impeached)?

A fine state of affairs. A US president mishandles a crucial moment when a ringing victory for the West is at hand.

This is why, since 2016, I have not bought the binary-choice argument.

The Very Stable Genius, who we now know likes to be spanked by his casual sex partners, is an obvious thumbs-down.

But this current guy? He's forever stained himself with a shame that will impact us all.