The worthlessness of ceasefires

 LITD posts have lately mostly been of a world-affairs nature, haven't they? That's because, for all post-America's other vexations - the utter silliness of both political parties, rampant loneliness, the resistance of the woke apparatus to being dismantled, the debt that is on track to crowd out all other government expenditures in a few short years, not replenishing the country's population, an utter disregard for the transcendent - foreign policy incoherence is the one most likely to take the first bite out of our safety and comfort and the reliability off our institutions.

Because each has been going on for a few years now, we have become inured to the severity of Russia's attack on a sovereign nation, and the savagery Iran, through its proxies, has inflicted on Israel. We assume that, with regard to the over-arching association of rogue players, each with its own ideology and internal agendas, that is bound together by a common intention to end the US-dominated international order that's been in place since 1945, sharp minds are on the case and will see that nothing gets too out of hand. 

Thus, we have clowns in the current administration, and the one coming in in January, coming up with "solutions" to the above-mentioned conflagrations based on an "end wars" mindset.

That's a really stupid way to approach the current situation. There are risks attendant to a goal of the attacked nation-states in each case winning their wars, but they're small compared to the consequences of appeasing the aggressors.

Tell you what. I'm going to quote Seth Mandel's latest column at Commentary in its entirety, because there'd be no point in trying to improve upon its incisiveness:

Buried in a New York Times explainer on the ICC’s issuance of an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu is this helpful nugget: “Gaza has been controlled by Hamas since 2007 and the militant group does not recognize its subjugation to a Palestine state.”

And why? Because Hamas is essentially a hostile occupying force on behalf of Iran. And who else falls into that category? Hezbollah in Lebanon. And for good measure, let’s add one more: Arguably the most troublesome pocket in the West Bank centers on Jenin, and the troublemakers in Jenin are proxies of Iran as well. For all intents and purposes, the city is foreign territory.

Here’s the point: Israel is not in conflict with any of the “host countries,” however generously we use that term, with whom it is supposedly negotiating.

It’s fun to pretend, but it’s not productive. Foolish faith in ceasefire agreements with entities that do not recognize the sovereignty of their own territory is how we got here. Oct. 6, 2023 was the last time a ceasefire’s false sense of security governed Israel’s understanding of the status quo. Oct. 7, 2023 was the result.

Let’s look at the ceasefire deal with Hezbollah announced yesterday.

The deal halts the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah for 60 days. Both the IDF and Hezbollah are to clear their forces from Lebanese territory south of the Litani River tout de suite. Filling the vacuum will be the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers—both of which are compromised by their deference to, and fear of, Hezbollah. A complaint board that will determine compliance with the agreement and adjudicate claims of violations will be under the supervision of the United States.

Yesterday, President Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron crowed that, “after many weeks of tireless diplomacy, Israel and Lebanon have accepted a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon.”

Between Israel and Lebanon? Have there been hostilities between Israel and Lebanon? Because it would be very silly to have Lebanese troops patrol the buffer zone if the buffer zone is meant to separate the IDF from Lebanese troops.

It’s wonderful that “Israel and Lebanon have accepted a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon.” Whoever this “Lebanon” guy is, he sounds nice. But I have no idea what he’s doing here.

Last week, men almost surely hired by Iran murdered in cold blood a Jerusalem-born Chabad rabbi in Dubai. Are Biden and Macron working on a “ceasefire” between Israel and the United Arab Emirates? Of course not, and no one is even suggesting such a thing, because it would be patently ridiculous on its face and arguably a mockery of the victim.

So that’s the conceptual absurdity of this ceasefire. What about its practicality?

“Eight vehicles and a motorcycle carrying Hezbollah personnel arrived at the ruins of Kfar Kila near Matula,” Israel’s Kann News reported this morning. “The IDF force that was on the spot drove them away with warning shots.”

Metula is an Israeli town on the border with Lebanon. Hezbollah had begun the ceasefire by advancing on Israel. Wrong direction, guys! Like legendary Vikings defensive end Jim Marshall recovering that fumble against the 49ers in 1964 and then running 65 yards into the wrong end zone—except on purpose.

And Israel’s response was to fire warning shots, because anything more aggressive—anything actually appropriate to the threat, in other words—would have triggered condemnation from the very allies that negotiated this ceasefire.

The Lebanese Armed Forces cannot enforce this ceasefire. If they could, they would have already cleared the area of Hezbollah, which has been operating with impunity for four decades. And the UN peacekeepers are Hezbollah’s trusted allies—that may sound harsh but it is just plain fact.

Yes, Israel is hoping to run out the clock on the Biden administration and have freer range of action once Donald Trump takes office. But Hezbollah knows Biden is on his way out, too, and that Trump is on his way in. And the enemy always gets a vote. Sometimes that vote is expressed by a nine-vehicle Hezbollah convoy encroaching on Israel’s sovereign border, in contemptuous contravention of a ceasefire signed by “Lebanon.”

And now, let us look at Keith Kellogg, the Very Stable Genius's choice for a guy to impose defeat on Ukraine: 

Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, President elect-Trump's pick for special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, has pushed a proposal to end the war between the two countries through Ukraine ceding land to Russia.

Why it matters: Trump named Kellogg as his choice for special envoy on Wednesday, months after Reuters reported on Kellogg's policy plan in June. The plan for a ceasefire signals U.S. support for the war effort would be scaled back.

• It also would mark a shift from the Biden administration's stance on the war and could be met with pushback from European allies.

Zoom in: Kellogg, who served as national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, co-authored a research report detailing his Ukraine policy proposal with former NSA chief of staff Fred Fleitz.

• "The United States would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement," Kellogg and Fleitz state in the plan.
• But future U.S. military aid will require Ukraine to participate in peace talks with Russia, according to the report.
• To convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to join peace talks, "President Biden and other NATO leaders should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees," the pair wrote.

The big picture: Trump has vowed to end the war in Ukraine using his personal relationship with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to get a peace deal.

Here's how the VSG thinks about such things:

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to end Russia's war with Ukraine if elected, saying in September that he would negotiate a deal "that's good for both sides." He also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and questioned further U.S. assistance to Ukraine.

"Good for both sides." What the hell kind of formulation is that? Russia is the aggressor in this situation. The West has no business dangling a nice outcome before Putin. The only way to speak of Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine is in terms of defeat.

All the F-16s, ATACMs, mines and Storm Shadows should have been provided no later that March 2022. Yes, it's great that they're arriving now, but their ability to be game-changers is badly diminished.

Trump, of course, views the whole thing transactionally. He wants to wind this up with minimal bad effect on what he perceives to be Putin's high regard of him. 

Ceasefires are nothing but a tamping-down of wrongs that will come back in another manifestation at some point. Fifteen years after the 1953 armistice that stopped fighting between North and South Korea, the crew of the USS Pueblo spent a year in captivity in the Kim dynasty's worker's paradise. Nixon's "peace with honor" in Vietnam led to the April 1975 crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon by tanks from the North, and the still-repugnant scene of desperate Vietnamese trying to hang on to the runners of the last helicopter to take off from the US embassy roof. 

If Ukraine and Israel don't achieve total victory over Russia and Iran respectively, we will have abandoned the world stage to Dodge City status. 

Post-America has decided it  has no use for moral clarity. Bad things will result. 

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afghanistan

 Because this is 2021 in post-America, hard and fast takes on this are, like school-district mask mandates, whether global climate conditions necessitate urgent collective action, and whether there is anything systemic about whatever degree of racism still exists in our society, likely to outnumber more multifaceted conclusions. 

I don't say this as an excuse to equivocate. Anybody who doesn't assert that this is a foreign policy debacle of historic proportions has a woefully underbaked understanding of what is happening, in my book.

The US State Department begging the Taliban to spare our embassy in Kabul, the beheading of Afghan government troops who have surrendered, the drawing up of lists of girls and women between the ages of 15 and 45 in the conquered provinces for the purpose of forcing them to marry Taliban fighters, the influx of jihadis from the UK, Libya, Syria and Pakistan, China's indication that it is prepared to recognize a Taliban government, and the loss of intelligence capabilities add up to an absolute disaster. 

Using this to score points against the Biden administration is an exercise in sleaze, given Trump's plans to host a Taliban delegation, back when "peace" talks were underway, at Camp David on September 11 of last year, and his endless-war talk since entering the political arena in 2015. 

This is not to say that Americans haven't grown tired of US presence in Afghanistan. 20 years is a long time. But is there a widespread understanding that we've only had a relatively small military footprint there for many years?

A development like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Following as this does on the heels of two other colossal Biden-administration foreign-policy blunders - allowing completion of the Nord Stream pipeline in Europe, and inviting a team from the UN Human Rights Council to come to the US to assess our societal health regarding race relations - it's apt to leave allies as bewildered as Trump's erratic approach did. 

This feels like the catalyst of ramifications to come. The way we were holding those ramifications at bay was far from perfect, but telling the Taliban "have at it" is going to prove grimly consequential. 

Death of al-Baghdadi - initial thoughts

Excellent work by the Delta Force A-Squadron. Meticulous planning, careful cultivation of local sources, and courageous risk-taking.

It was perfectly appropriate for Trump to describe him as dying like a simpering coward.

I have no problem with the administration not notifying Congress beforehand. Given the zeal of Democrats to kneecap Trump (a real issue, which exists alongside Trump's objectionable nature), it may well have messed up the mission.

The Washington Post's decision to change its original headline, characterizing him as the chief terrorist of ISIS, to one depicting him as an "austere religious scholar" was made by someone and signed off on by someone. Who? This information must be made public and this person / these persons must be subjected to a level of ridicule that has them concerned about career implications.

Anybody in any current political or ideological camp who uses this occasion to advance a brand or protect turf needs to b e called out for making a shameful decision. This is a great moment in the history of the struggle against jihad.

ISIS didn't die with al-Baghdadi. Ridding the world of this ideology is a long-haul undertaking.

Bolton's departure

Surprising in some ways, not in others. It actually looked like a doomed arrangement from the start. Bolton has a set of core principles that drive his policy positions, and his boss - well, we know that he's driven by his craving for self-glorification.

But the fronts on which the rift widened had been increasing for a while:

Back in May, with tensions rising between the U.S. and Iran, Trump’s Fox buddy Tucker Carlson began taking hard shots at him on the air for his hawkishness. It got worse in June when Trump canceled a bombing strike on Iran at the last minute against the advice of Bolton, among others; Carlson took to telling Fox viewers that Bolton was a “bureaucratic tapeworm” and Trump reportedly lamented to a confidant about his own natsec advisors, “These people want to push us into a war, and it’s so disgusting.” A few weeks later, Bolton was conspicuously absent from Trump’s big photo op with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ, having been tasked with a visit to Mongolia at the time instead. (Ironically, Carlson did accompany Trump, albeit as part of Fox’s team.)

Things seemed to deteriorate from there. The most hardcore Republican Bolton critic in Congress, Rand Paul, was deputized by Trump in July to try to broker negotiations with Iran. (Paul is already celebrating Bolton’s termination on Twitter today.) More recently reports being bubbling up that Bolton had been sidelined from the peace process in Afghanistan and was being excluded from meetings. Rumors began circulating that his relationship with Mike Pompeo, a Trump favorite, had collapsed, with natsec deputies unsure who was actually steering the diplomatic ship between the more negotiation-minded Pompeo and the more hardline Bolton.

The final straw may have been Bolton reportedly (and correctly) urging Trump to resist his instincts to invite the Taliban to Camp David for peace talks. If anything finished him off in Trump’s eyes, it may have been the public perception over the last 48 hours that his NSA was right about that and showed “toughness” and judgment that Trump lacked. In fact, Trump may have suspected Bolton or his team of leaking the fact that Bolton opposed Trump’s idea and chose to axe him for that reason. The president hates when his aides get the glory that he thinks he deserves, as Steve Bannon might tell you.

Regarding the above-mentioned set of core principles, adherence to such a thing comes as such a shock to most people in our relativistic, situational age that it's axiomatic that references to Bolton in news stories are going to preface his name with the adjective "hawkish." What that means, as applied to Mr. Bolton, is that he understands this: You never legitimize rogue states or groups. It's folly of the highest order. North Korea, Iran and the Taliban are deadly serious about destroying the United States and imposing an order on the world that would be the antithesis of Western liberalism.

Trumpists employ the term "endless wars" with predictable frequency. But as Andrew McCarthy points out in a piece at National Review today, the fact that the US has been in Afghanistan 18 years does not by itself mean anything:

Afghanistan is not the war. The war is against the jihadist forces of sharia supremacism. We have to fight them wherever they work to stage attacks against the United States, our allies, and our interests.

Per the first excerpt above, Pompeo seems more inclined to see possibility in negotiation, but that may be due to the nature of his current job. I don't think there's a gaping amount of daylight between Bolton and Pompeo in terms of basic worldview. I certainly don't have a fly on the wall reporting back to me from either the White House or the State Department, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Pompeo leave under some kind of circumstances sooner rather than later.

Why Rahsida's grandmother has to go through checkpoints

I covered this some in Tuesday's post entitled "Wickedness Afoot in post-America," but Shoshana Bryen at Daily Wire provides a searingly thorough look at just why it is that Siti and indeed Tlaib's own mother, who is a US citizen, has to go through "dehumanizing checkpoints between the West Bank and Israel proper:

Is it insensitive to point out that international Arab wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, terror wars (so-called intifadas) in 1989 and 2001, and rocket wars in 2006, 2009, and 2014 have all been started by Arab states or Palestinian leaders against the state of Israel with the intention of destroying it?

It is, perhaps, rude to point out that in the 1949 war of annihilation he declared on Israel, the King of Jordan scooped up the territory that had been allocated for a Palestinian-Arab state. It’s probably uncharitable to mention that he annexed the Palestinian-allotted territory in a move recognized only by Great Britain and Pakistan, but no one was moved to do anything about it. And pitiless to mention that Tlaib's grandmother was thus illegally occupied from 1949 – 1967. By Jordan. And thick-skinned, perhaps, to point out that Israel only entered the Palestinian picture when the Jordanian king — in a mind-bogglingly stupid moment — entered 1967’s Six Day War on the fourth day and managed to lose all of his illegally held possessions.

And given what Ms. Tlaib considers to be her grandmother’s suffering, it seems hardhearted to point out that there were no checkpoints during the Jordanian occupation because no Israeli person — no Jewish person — ever passed from Israel into Jordanian-held Jerusalem at all between 1949 and 1967. No Jewish person could pray at the holiest of Jewish sites and 58 synagogues on the eastern side of the city were dynamited and destroyed. And no Jordanian or Palestinian person was permitted by Jordan to pass from Jordan into Israel during that period for work, medical care, or school.

It really is harsh to point out that after Israel acquired the West Bank territory and, in the course, defending itself from the king’s weak-mindedness, Palestinian workers were permitted to travel to and work in Israel — and still are. Some 100,000 – 110,000 Palestinians currently work in Israel and another 30,000 work in West Bank communities. Is it callous to note that those checkpoints were the result of Palestinian terrorism that ended any hope of free or casual passage?

No. It is not.

It thus seems fair to note that while not one Jordanian was killed by a terrorist Palestinian to liberate “Palestine” from the Jordanian government in the 19 years of occupation, 2,143 Israelis have been killed and nearly 10,000 wounded by Palestinians in deliberate attacks. It seems fair also to emphasize the word “deliberate.” Dead Jews were the goal. Fair, too, to remind her that 19 of the dead and 172 of the wounded were victims of a massacre during a Passover Seder; Nava Applebaum and her father David were murdered sitting in a café the night before her wedding; Kobi Mandell and Yosef Ishran, two 13-year-old boys, had their heads smashed against rocks; 3-month-old Hadas, 4-year-old Elad, 11-year-old Yoav, and parents Ruth and Udi Fogel were murdered in their beds. Eighteen people, including Americans Malki Roth and Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum, were killed in a Sbarro pizza parlor (their killers received an estimated $910,823 in “salary” from the Palestinian Authority).

There are 2,132 others to be named and remembered.

Israelis live not only with checkpoints, but with intrusive security in airports, schools, shopping centers, concert halls, and other places because all have been attacked by people — Palestinians, not Costa Ricans or Laotians or Nepalese — intent on killing them.

And yet, Israel is here, strong, vibrant, growing, democratic, and tolerant of everyone except those openly dedicated to its destruction.

These are facts, Congresswoman Tlaib. You want your family not to have to deal with checkpoints? Switch sides. Stop aligning yourself with evil.

 

Friday roundup

Stacey Abrams, the poster girl for delusion chic:

Speaking at the Center for American Progress’s Ideas Conference, Abrams said: "The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the past 10 years and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the voices coming into progress. I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are and exactly how we won."

Why is this guy still drawing a breath instead of suffering Hell's eternal torment? 

John Walker Lindh, the man convicted of helping the Taliban following the September 11 attacks, was just released from federal prison in Terre Haute.

Lindh’s case began in November of 2001 when he was fighting alongside the Taliban. The California native had converted to Islam as a teenager and eventually traveled overseas to fight alongside radical Islamists.

Not two months after 9/11, Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, detained and interviewed by a CIA officer, a former Marine named Mike Spann. Just hours later, Spann was killed in a prisoner uprising at the same facility. In the aftermath of that uprising, Lindh was brought back to the U.S. and charged with conspiring to kill Americans and engaging in terrorism.

A conviction could have meant life in prison. Instead, attorneys accepted a plea deal approved by President George W. Bush. Those charges were dropped and Lindh only pleaded guilty to serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons while doing so. That resulted in a 20-year sentence. With good behavior, Lindh will be released on May 23 after serving 17 years.

AOC finds the ideological significance of cauliflower:

 In a stream-of-consciousness discussion of composting, the Green New Deal, and community gardens, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lamented cauliflower as symbol of colonialism.

“Looks like they’ve got composting going on, which is so awesome, too, because composting is really hard to do in a neighborhood like this. We just don’t have the pick ups and the ease of it that a lot of other communities have. So that’s really how you do it, right, that is such a core component of the Green New Deal, is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context. And it’s an area that I — we get the most pushback on, because people say, like, why do you need to do that? That’s too hard. But when you really think about it, when someone says that it’s too hard to do a green space that grows yucca instead of, I don’t know, cauliflower or something, what you’re doing is that you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism, and that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements, because they come with the colonial lens on them. And it should be no surprise that sometimes a lot of these projects don’t work out occasionally because our communities are naturally attuned to live in an environmentally conscious way.”

Or, you know, the decision to grow cauliflower might be a reflection of what plants will grow best in a garden with that temperature range, soil types, and rainfall level. Some yucca varieties can handle a range of temperature and rainfall, some can’t. All of this information is a Google search away, and one can fairly wonder why a U.S. congresswoman is weighing in on what vegetables should be grown in citizens’ gardens.

I always wonder about these situations in which a nation nearly immediately sours on a leader it has just elected. Such is apparently the case in Brazil:

Earlier this month a procession of Brazil’s military cabinet ministers came to President Jair Bolsonaro with the same clear message: muzzle your far-right keyboard warriors or your government will implode.

Propelled to the presidency by a vociferous army of online ideologues, including his sons, Bolsonaro’s government comprises an uneasy mix of radicals, pragmatists and economic liberals. In his five months in office, Bolsonaro has done little to rein in the extremist fringe, even when they target Congress, the Supreme Court and members of his own administration. The former members of the armed forces, who make up a third of his cabinet and constitute the moderate faction, have endured particularly vicious abuse.

Since the retired generals’ intervention, the public mud-slinging has ebbed a little, but the sense of division and improvisation in government has not. Bolsonaro’s approval ratings are sliding fast, while prominent erstwhile supporters who hoped for clean, decisive government have recanted, and legislators are beginning to jump ship. Even in financial markets, which helped carry the retired paratrooper to office, hope is fizzling. The real earlier this week reached an 8-month low. The presidency did not respond to a request for comment.

"I’m amazed by how weak Bolsonaro is politically. The government has everything going for it but sabotages itself with controversy and insults," said Renato Nobile, a Bolsonaro voter and the CEO of Genial Advisory, which manages over 30 billion reais ($7.4 billion) in assets. “Many people want the military, Mourao is more skilled than Bolsonaro,” he said in reference to Vice-President Hamilton Mourao, a four-star general.

The saving grace of the Trump administration is the grownups on board. Sohrab Ahmar interviews one of them in the New York Post:

“White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War” screamed a New York Times headline.

“When you see that headline, it’s flashy, but it doesn’t begin to reflect the depth of the work that’s been done,” Pompeo says as we sit down for an interview at the plush Palace Hotel in Midtown.

Yes, the Pentagon updated a military contingency plan in case the Tehran regime escalated its attacks against US assets and interests in the Persian Gulf. But the plan was one of several options presented to the commander in chief. To go by that Times headline, and others like it, you would think Team Trump is driving America to war, willy-nilly; that Washington is the aggressor and Tehran the victim without agency.

Fact is, Iran has a “revolutionary, theocratic regime that is intent upon the destruction of the United States and Israel,” Pompeo tells me. “That’s the backdrop to all this.”

President Trump hasn’t boosted the risk of a confrontation by ratcheting up sanctions. “The risk is the same” as ever, and it comes from Iranian leaders who “have made the decision that they’re willing to contemplate attacks — kinetic, military attacks — against the United States.”

What’s new is that the United States under Trump will no longer entertain the fiction that Iran’s various militias and terror proxies are somehow independent of the regime.

Pompeo warns the Iranians: “Whether you subcontract, or you partner, or you train, or you equip, or you operate it, or you lead it, if you allow it to engage in attacks against Western interests — we’re not going to allow you to create public deniability. Because we’ll know full well what’s happening. That’s not going to stop us from attacking those who made the decisions to put Americans at risk.”

Theresa May resigns as UK Prime Minister. I realize that a move like Brexit is fraught with arcane considerations, but it seems to me that that just argues for the cleanest, most decisive break that can be accomplished, and she just spent a little too long in the realm of if-this-then-we-have-to-consider-that.  Stock up on popcorn for the Boris Johnson-Jeremy Corbin scramble to succeed her.

Great Sarah Hoyt essay at PJ Media on why the Left has to gin up alarm about "white supremacy."

LITD tries to keep the discourse on the level of ideas and principles, but when someone is a disgusting human being, she must be called that

For instance, Ilhan Omar:

When speaking about the 9/11 terror attacks, which killed approximately 3,000 American citizens, Omar described the attacks as "some people did something."

"CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties," Omar said.

Omar was met by hundreds of protesters when she attended the March event in Los Angeles, who expressed strong disapproval of her use of anti-Semitic tropes and promotion of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Omar responded to the "very interesting" pro-Israel demonstrators by saying: "I don't think any of them realize that people like myself and many of the people in this room could care less about what they have to say."

May God have mercy on her soul. May the Father of Lord Jesus find some miraculous way to heal the rot of her being.

In the meantime, it's important that the point Dan Crenshaw makes gets a proper airing:

Dan Crenshaw‏Verified account @DanCrenshawTX

Dan Crenshaw Retweeted Imam Mohamad Tawhidi

First Member of Congress to ever describe terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 as “some people who did something”. Unbelievable.

 Exit question: Will the Democrat party put up with her indefinitely?