Not sure if this has been posted here in the last few days. On Twitter I found a video of an all female tank crew, in three seperate tanks, who fought Hamas on Oct. 7.
amazing story-they drove from Egyptian border, when the attacks started. 17 hours of combat, against superior odds. I doubt if any of them, save the female commander, were over 25.
They eliminated 50 Hamas in that time. Saved hundreds of Israelis on that terrible day. https://twitter.com/AvivaKlompas/status/1728548380694253700
Shame that American military has men pretending to be women, and worries about proper pronouns.
I doubt any feminists will even notice what those brave soldiers accomplished.
“Slouching towards” the Alliance that Dare Not Speak Its Name….
(The author, while noticing some of the strange and unseemly paradoxes—the funny business, if you will—simply cannot, or dares not, draw the only reasonable conclusion….)
(Rather, ‘Why won’t “Biden” admit it?’…
…but, then, to ask the question is to answer it.)
Interesting tidbit on the recent attack by Houthi rebels on a Merchant Ship. US and Japanese ships responded. However 2 Chinese ships in the area did not respond to the distress call.
…Biden apologized for doubting Hamas’s randomly generated death toll numbers.
No word yet on whether he knelt wearing a keffiyeh.
Interesting tidbit on the recent attack by Houthi rebels on a Merchant Ship. US and Japanese ships responded. However 2 Chinese ships in the area did not respond to the distress call.
Jim, just watched the video you linked. Thank you. Fighting Soldiers who did their jobs quite well.
Great video Jim, about the female Israeli tank crews fighting on October 7th. Thanks.
I liked how one fox figured out what a trampoline was for.
Let’s hope that Goldman is right.
Inspiring, those 3 women tank crews.
Having worked on American M1 Abrams Tanks as a mechanic, whose interior can only be accessed thru hatches on top of the hull or turret, I can appreciate that the Israeli tanks have their engine in the front and have a rear access panel. In order to gain access to an Abrams turret you must be able to do a ” dip” type exercise to raise and lower yourself into the turret. Apparently, the Israeli tank is more capable of operating as a troop carrier with some modification than the American M1 Abrams.
@Gringo:
Yeah. Too bad it didn’t weigh enough to get some more fun out of it.
Some of my favorite vids are animals playing.
Just did some online shopping on Amazon. Some deals were too good to resist. I feel guilty supporting Bezos and the Post, but it felt good to be contributing to the Chinese economy.
The Merkava can accomodate 6? soldiers inside the rear hull, but a major design reason is to accommodate lots of main gun rounds and to allow rapid reloading of stowed rounds (IIRC). Lessons learned from the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
As cute as those foxes are…they’re a pest when they get close to humans & in Australia a malicious leftover from the Brits…feral invasive & deadly.
But fortunately no rabies here as yet…fire ants? Yes we have those now too…blah!
Re: Goldman column
Mike Plaiss, Gringo:
That was an excellent piece. Especially since I agree with it. 🙂
__________________________
Popular support for Israel remains strong in the United States. According to an October 16 Quinnipiac poll of 1.737 Americans, 84% of Republicans, 76% of Democrats and 74% of independents believe that support for Israel is in the national interest of the United States. That counts for a great deal in an election year.
The widely held view that mounting Arab civilian casualties in Gaza will swing “world opinion” against Israel is wrong for two reasons….
The Western public will tend to blame Hamas for using hospital patients and personnel as human shields, rather than blaming Israel for rooting it out of its concealed command posts….
Israel will find and kill only a fraction of the Hamas armed forces, but it will be a large enough fraction to cripple and demoralize the organization. Israel’s broader objective is to make Hamas a byword for humiliation and destroy its moral authority as well as its capacity to fight.
–David P. Goldman, “Israel is winning and will prevail in Gaza war”
\https://asiatimes.com/2023/11/israel-is-winning-and-will-prevail-in-gaza-war/
__________________________
It’s a lousy deal that there is so much sympathy for the Hamas neo-Nazis. But I see encouraging signs.
MC, Thanks for the link. The young lady’s information about the Muslim Brotherhood confirms what I’ve learned elsewhere but in far more detail. It’s very sobering.
Goldman’s article says Hamas is estimated to have 30,000 to 40,000 fighters. Hamas authorities claim about 12,000 fatalities in Gaza so far. They don’t say how many were active Hamas fighters. Given the IDF’s careful approach, we can assume that a large percentage of the dead, whatever the number, were Hamas. In Goldman’s theory, Israel is now approaching the number killed which will deactivate Hamas. We can hope so.
It is too soon for Goldman or anybody to know whether Israel will succeed in ending Hamas rule in Gaza.
I hope they do, and it seems they’re prepared to do so – but too many Jew hating world leaders will continue to unfairly demonize them.
‘yes, Israel has a right to defend itself – but it can’t look like revenge.’
Bah.
War is hell, and looks like hell.
Having a neighbor with 2 million folk who hate you, and are willing to die to kill you, also looks like hell.
Israel needs to control Gaza, and stop terrorist from getting weapons – but the USA might not allow them to do so. Tho senile Biden might.
And it doesn’t look like Biden knows for sure.
I’d guess the Irish PM also opposed Israel going after the hospital – Hamas HQ, but haven’t seen quotes on it.
The ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians in Nagorno-Karabakh remains heavily undiscussed; and I also have no news.
In the politics makes strange bedfellows department. Oliver Stone expresses doubts about the 2020 election.
“Have you ever seen a conspiracy you didn’t like” Maher retorts.
@ Miguel – “Spin,strangeness,charm” had quite a few more posts on the Israeli-Hamas war, including a couple of interesting items that were new to me.
The first one supports an observation in the post I linked about the Gazan-turned-Jew (in the Newspeak thread), who believes that any Palestinians not supportive of Hamas have already left Gaza.
ADDENDUM: Tzvi Yechezkeli, the Arab affairs commentator of Channel 13 (who speaks fluent Arabic and has extensive experience going undercover in Islamist circles), comments (in Hebrew) on the “quiet emigration” from Gaza. Some 370,000 mostly young people with college degrees (such as they are) have left since 2007: the main reason cited is the lack of any economic opportunity in Gaza unless as part of the HamaSS apparatus.
How do they get out? Turkey apparently gives them visas, and Egypt allows holders of such visas transit. Once in Turkey, they join the traffic of refugees from Turkey into Greece, whence they can fan out across the EU.
I doubt if they quit hating Jews after leaving, although they may not want to actively fight them for Hamas. That could explain a lot of the pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel mobs, which are under no threat from either Israel, local Jews, or the EU (or UK) constabularies.
Tens of thousands of Hamas fighters have now been underground for nearly seven weeks. Their stores of food and fuel could be running low; they were prepared for an Israeli incursion, but not an open-ended one. Meanwhile, the IDF has systematically destroyed and sealed hundreds of tunnel entrances — upward of 600 at last count — as it slowly tightens the noose around the underground network in northern Gaza. Hamas’s subterranean strategy has been counteracted by a simple and patient Israeli answer: Burying Hamas forces alive in their own tunnels.
Then, all of a sudden, a deal was announced this week that drops the 1,100-to-one formula to three-to-one: 50 hostages for 150 Palestinian prisoners, all of the latter either women or prisoners who were minors at the time of their terror attacks.
But more interesting than who they are is who they are not. No Hamas fighters will be released, in part because Hamas didn’t really demand it. The prisoner release was treated by Hamas negotiators as a face-saving PR exercise. Their priority, Israeli officials say, was the ceasefire.
Hamas first demanded a month-long ceasefire in exchange for a few dozen hostages. Israel didn’t respond. As Hamas losses mounted, its demands shrank. It has now reached 50 hostages for four days’ respite.
I’m sure the IDF is well aware that the cease-fire will allow Hamas fighters to desert their most-endangered burrows before they are sealed, and is gearing up for whatever that situation demands, which Gur describes in his post
(see next comment).
Read the whole thing; Gur makes other interesting points:
With a deal apparently nearing completion that could release dozens of abducted children and their mothers, many of their families have suddenly gone silent. Hamas, they reason, will try to hold on to children whose families prove most effective in pressuring the Israeli government.
If last week every family tried to draw attention to their missing child, now the race is on to make their child forgettable.
It’s hard to imagine the torment of such a moment.
…
Hamas abducted too many, including babies and ailing grandmothers, and did so in such cruel ways that the old logic of prisoner exchanges [1 Israeli for 1000 terrorists] has been forever upended in the Israeli psyche.
…
As any aspiring gangster knows, there’s a tipping point to extortion when the cost of avoiding violence rises past the cost of the violence itself, when the victim’s incentives flip from payment to vengeful defiance.
At the start of the war, Hamas and Islamic Jihad started to trickle out hostages in ways that showed they didn’t quite grasp the change that had come over Israelis. They tried to delay the ground incursion by promising to release two hostages every few days.
But Israel ignored the gambit, and every ensuing attempt to dangle hostages before it. It launched the ground incursion with no more than a mention of the Israelis held in Gaza.
And as the IDF advanced, photos began to leak of soldiers posing in the main centers of Hamas rule, including the parliament building and various headquarters, before demolishing these symbolic buildings.
Some foreign observers were mystified at the practice. Critics complained of “wanton” destruction. But Hamas saw and understood. When Israel telegraphed for three long weeks that it was preparing to enter Shifa Hospital, it was giving the enemy time to escape. It didn’t want a bloody battle in the hallways of a hospital. But it did want to enter that hospital and show Hamas there are no safe places anywhere in Gaza. And Hamas saw and understood.
This is key to understanding the war. Israel isn’t speaking to the West. Its leadership registers Western discourse as a second-tier concern. Its message is for Hamas, and this message is the strategic heart of the war effort: There is nowhere in Gaza we won’t go, no stone or tunnel or building we won’t overturn in pursuit of you. None of the tactics that once kept you safe apply anymore.
…
But as the length of the lull shortened [through negotiations], new demands surfaced. For six hours each day of the truce, Israel must ground its reconnaissance drones. On Thursday the deal was delayed when Hamas sent through their Qatari representatives more demands for additional unspecified limits on Israeli field intelligence forces.
Israeli officials have explained these demands as part of the hostage release process: Not all the child hostages are in Hamas hands. Its fighters must travel aboveground to collect them from elsewhere in Gaza. They don’t want to be tracked while doing so.
This is, to put it mildly, a strange explanation. There’s a simpler one. A desperate Hamas with many fighters trapped in the steadily tightening noose around Gaza City has negotiated a last-ditch means for saving its northern forces by giving them a brief window to flee south in which the Israelis agree not to watch their escape too closely.
This is why Israeli officials are optimistic that Hamas will ultimately carry out its part of the deal. Hamas needs the time.
…
But Hamas demands are also preparing for the opposite eventuality, stipulating that as long as a roughly 10-per-day release rate is sustained, the deal can remain in force for longer than four days.
Or put another way, Hamas doesn’t know how long its retreat will take and is preparing for all contingencies.
If Hamas reneges, the war resumes, and whatever emotions Israeli leaders may feel — a palpable sense of guilt hangs over every cabinet deliberation — they will broadcast a collective shrug and return to the business of Hamas’s demolition.
…
The war now moves south and will drive a whole new potential civilian humanitarian crisis. Hamas in Khan Younis will be just as trapped, but it will have far more troops available, a clearer understanding of IDF strategy and Israeli implacability, and a longer time to have readied the battlefield. It is there that the bulk of Hamas’s forces will find themselves in a pitched battle for survival — and where the hostages will serve as Hamas’s last available currency for buying pauses to regroup, resupply and, if the offer to Israel is generous, even escape.
@ Mike Plaiss in re Spengler’s post.
The first thing is that it was written before the hostage cease-fire was announced, so some of his observations may have been affected by the changes in the situation.
Second, the post he linked to is a very interesting analysis worth reading on its own, irrespective of the current application.
Nations do not fight to the death, but they frequently fight until their pool of prospective fighters has reached a point of practical exhaustion. In most cases, this involves reaching the 30% mark where casualties are concerned.
Wars of this character demarcate many turning points in world history. They include the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War and, at least in some respects, the two World Wars of the 20th century
…
There are disturbing similarities in these wars to the present situation in Western Asia.
There is no simple common characterization that applies to all the wars of demographic exhaustion, but there surely are common elements to be found in all or most of them. These include the belief that the alternative to pursuing the war would be national ruin, as well as the belief of ordinary soldiers that the war will lead to their social and economic advancement …
These were existential wars rather than wars of choice in the minds of the major combatants. Wide historical surveys risk selecting data that fits broad patterns, to be sure, but the parallelisms are sufficiently compelling to make the effort worthwhile.
What we know of these wars challenges the usual way in which we think about rationality in politics. With hindsight, the decision to initiate and continue hostilities on this scale seems an act of madness. In most cases, moreover, the greatest number of casualties occurred after hope of ultimate victory had diminished or disappeared. The principal actors, to be sure, evinced a certain kind of rationality, albeit of a perverse order: They believed that failure to fight and win would undermine their national raison d’etre. In fact, their fear of national decline was not entirely misplaced.
In many cases the consequence of war was a catastrophic decline marked by falling birth rates and declining population, wealth and power after the cessation of hostilities. The population of Greece declined sharply after the Peloponnesian War. After the Napoleonic Wars, France entered a long period of demographic stagnation and relative decline. The American South suffered a long and terrible economic setback. And Germany came out of the 20th century in aggravated demographic decline.
The belief among combatants in wars of exhaustion that nothing less than national survival was at stake was not wholly irrational, although in some cases the cause of national decline appears more psychological than objective. The Greek city-states after Alexander appear to have lost their will to live; France, after dominating Europe for a century and half, entered a long period of demoralization after Napoleon’s defeat. Germany has regained economic power and international standing, but fails to reproduce.
We may conjecture that a combination of objective economic stress and a subjective crisis of national identity join to create conditions for a perfect storm. In that case combatants are motivated to fight to the death, and a very large proportion of them have had the opportunity to do so.
…
Detecting such patterns has great practical importance, because perfect storm conditions are possible, indeed difficult to avoid, in the contemporary world—notably in the Sunni-Shia conflict in Western Asia. The intra-Muslim conflict, to be sure, remains scattered among geographically-contained civil wars and proxy conflicts, but it has the potential to erupt into a much larger war of exhaustion. The combination of economic stress and the cultural challenges to traditional life in the Muslim world is explosive, and might give rise to civilization wars on the scale of the past.
There follows a close analysis of the prior wars Goldman listed at the beginning, and the application of his thesis to the intra-Muslim conflicts, rather than to the Israeli-Palestinian one, but they are all connected.
Do Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla know about this?
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
I wax and wane on David P Goldman (aka Spengler), but he’s always interesting and worth reading.
https://asiatimes.com/2023/11/israel-is-winning-and-will-prevail-in-gaza-war/
Not sure if this has been posted here in the last few days. On Twitter I found a video of an all female tank crew, in three seperate tanks, who fought Hamas on Oct. 7.
amazing story-they drove from Egyptian border, when the attacks started. 17 hours of combat, against superior odds. I doubt if any of them, save the female commander, were over 25.
They eliminated 50 Hamas in that time. Saved hundreds of Israelis on that terrible day. https://twitter.com/AvivaKlompas/status/1728548380694253700
Shame that American military has men pretending to be women, and worries about proper pronouns.
I doubt any feminists will even notice what those brave soldiers accomplished.
“Slouching towards” the Alliance that Dare Not Speak Its Name….
(The author, while noticing some of the strange and unseemly paradoxes—the funny business, if you will—simply cannot, or dares not, draw the only reasonable conclusion….)
“Iran’s Implausible Deniability;
“The terror state and its various proxy militias—including Hamas—are obviously acting in concert. Why won’t the U.S. admit it?”—
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/iran-deniability
(Rather, ‘Why won’t “Biden” admit it?’…
…but, then, to ask the question is to answer it.)
Interesting tidbit on the recent attack by Houthi rebels on a Merchant Ship. US and Japanese ships responded. However 2 Chinese ships in the area did not respond to the distress call.
BREAKING: Biden Apologizes to Hamas
…Biden apologized for doubting Hamas’s randomly generated death toll numbers.
No word yet on whether he knelt wearing a keffiyeh.
Interesting tidbit on the recent attack by Houthi rebels on a Merchant Ship. US and Japanese ships responded. However 2 Chinese ships in the area did not respond to the distress call.
Jim, just watched the video you linked. Thank you. Fighting Soldiers who did their jobs quite well.
Great video Jim, about the female Israeli tank crews fighting on October 7th. Thanks.
I liked how one fox figured out what a trampoline was for.
Let’s hope that Goldman is right.
Inspiring, those 3 women tank crews.
Having worked on American M1 Abrams Tanks as a mechanic, whose interior can only be accessed thru hatches on top of the hull or turret, I can appreciate that the Israeli tanks have their engine in the front and have a rear access panel. In order to gain access to an Abrams turret you must be able to do a ” dip” type exercise to raise and lower yourself into the turret. Apparently, the Israeli tank is more capable of operating as a troop carrier with some modification than the American M1 Abrams.
@Gringo:
Yeah. Too bad it didn’t weigh enough to get some more fun out of it.
Some of my favorite vids are animals playing.
Just did some online shopping on Amazon. Some deals were too good to resist. I feel guilty supporting Bezos and the Post, but it felt good to be contributing to the Chinese economy.
I don’t have Prime yet, and I’m not yet in this category: Full List of Business Leaders Said to Have Spent $40K To Dine With Xi. With luck, I won’t miss next year’s big Xijinpingdig.
The Merkava can accomodate 6? soldiers inside the rear hull, but a major design reason is to accommodate lots of main gun rounds and to allow rapid reloading of stowed rounds (IIRC). Lessons learned from the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/
As cute as those foxes are…they’re a pest when they get close to humans & in Australia a malicious leftover from the Brits…feral invasive & deadly.
But fortunately no rabies here as yet…fire ants? Yes we have those now too…blah!
Re: Goldman column
Mike Plaiss, Gringo:
That was an excellent piece. Especially since I agree with it. 🙂
__________________________
Popular support for Israel remains strong in the United States. According to an October 16 Quinnipiac poll of 1.737 Americans, 84% of Republicans, 76% of Democrats and 74% of independents believe that support for Israel is in the national interest of the United States. That counts for a great deal in an election year.
The widely held view that mounting Arab civilian casualties in Gaza will swing “world opinion” against Israel is wrong for two reasons….
The Western public will tend to blame Hamas for using hospital patients and personnel as human shields, rather than blaming Israel for rooting it out of its concealed command posts….
Israel will find and kill only a fraction of the Hamas armed forces, but it will be a large enough fraction to cripple and demoralize the organization. Israel’s broader objective is to make Hamas a byword for humiliation and destroy its moral authority as well as its capacity to fight.
–David P. Goldman, “Israel is winning and will prevail in Gaza war”
\https://asiatimes.com/2023/11/israel-is-winning-and-will-prevail-in-gaza-war/
__________________________
It’s a lousy deal that there is so much sympathy for the Hamas neo-Nazis. But I see encouraging signs.
MC, Thanks for the link. The young lady’s information about the Muslim Brotherhood confirms what I’ve learned elsewhere but in far more detail. It’s very sobering.
Goldman’s article says Hamas is estimated to have 30,000 to 40,000 fighters. Hamas authorities claim about 12,000 fatalities in Gaza so far. They don’t say how many were active Hamas fighters. Given the IDF’s careful approach, we can assume that a large percentage of the dead, whatever the number, were Hamas. In Goldman’s theory, Israel is now approaching the number killed which will deactivate Hamas. We can hope so.
It is too soon for Goldman or anybody to know whether Israel will succeed in ending Hamas rule in Gaza.
I hope they do, and it seems they’re prepared to do so – but too many Jew hating world leaders will continue to unfairly demonize them.
‘yes, Israel has a right to defend itself – but it can’t look like revenge.’
Bah.
War is hell, and looks like hell.
Having a neighbor with 2 million folk who hate you, and are willing to die to kill you, also looks like hell.
Israel needs to control Gaza, and stop terrorist from getting weapons – but the USA might not allow them to do so. Tho senile Biden might.
And it doesn’t look like Biden knows for sure.
I’d guess the Irish PM also opposed Israel going after the hospital – Hamas HQ, but haven’t seen quotes on it.
The ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians in Nagorno-Karabakh remains heavily undiscussed; and I also have no news.
In the politics makes strange bedfellows department. Oliver Stone expresses doubts about the 2020 election.
“Have you ever seen a conspiracy you didn’t like” Maher retorts.
Even a stopped watch is right once in a while.
Oliver Stone Leaves Bill Maher SPEECHLESS on STOLEN 2020 Election!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txg5vgJol2w
This baby goat gets some better action on a trampoline.
I suspect it actually weighs more than the fox does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L198jPLg_5o
@ Miguel – “Spin,strangeness,charm” had quite a few more posts on the Israeli-Hamas war, including a couple of interesting items that were new to me.
The first one supports an observation in the post I linked about the Gazan-turned-Jew (in the Newspeak thread), who believes that any Palestinians not supportive of Hamas have already left Gaza.
https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2023/11/22/hostages-for-truce-approved-attempted-terror-attack-on-niagara-falls-israeli-arab-woman-speaks-out-about-what-israeli-society-was-like-for-her/
I doubt if they quit hating Jews after leaving, although they may not want to actively fight them for Hamas. That could explain a lot of the pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel mobs, which are under no threat from either Israel, local Jews, or the EU (or UK) constabularies.
The second is at the end of the post here:
https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2023/11/23/implementation-of-truce-for-hostage-release-deal-postponed-until-tomorrow-how-international-aid-to-arafats-regime-begat-hamass/
“ADDENDUM: balancing the very pessimistic views on the “truce-for-hostages deal” by generally clear-headed people I featured yesterday, here is a more optimistic view from my favorite Times of Israel analyst, Chaviv Rettig Gur.”
I’m sure the IDF is well aware that the cease-fire will allow Hamas fighters to desert their most-endangered burrows before they are sealed, and is gearing up for whatever that situation demands, which Gur describes in his post
(see next comment).
Read the whole thing; Gur makes other interesting points:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hostage-deal-even-if-it-fails-shows-hamass-desperation/
@ Mike Plaiss in re Spengler’s post.
The first thing is that it was written before the hostage cease-fire was announced, so some of his observations may have been affected by the changes in the situation.
Second, the post he linked to is a very interesting analysis worth reading on its own, irrespective of the current application.
https://asiatimes.com/2016/03/the-30-solution-when-war-without-end-ends-spengler/
There follows a close analysis of the prior wars Goldman listed at the beginning, and the application of his thesis to the intra-Muslim conflicts, rather than to the Israeli-Palestinian one, but they are all connected.
Do Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla know about this?