Shifa hospital and the hostages

The New Neo Posted on by

The Israelis have explored the tunnels under Shifa hospital and have reported on what they found:

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have complete control of Gaza City’s massive Shifa Hospital, believed to be home to Hamas’s headquarters.

Unfortunately, the IDF did not find any [living] hostages, but they claim they found evidence Hamas once held them at the hospital.

The IDF discovered “a significant stash of Hamas weaponry.”

Also, they found Hamas uniforms that seem to have been discarded hastily, probably when the jihadis donned civilian clothing in order to flee.

As far as violence goes:

… [N]one of the soldiers shot their guns. Instead, they entered the hospital calmly and controlled, not engaging any medical personnel or patients.

The IDF claimed it “was ‘not overrunning’ the hospital, asserting troops were conducting a ‘focused’ operation ‘in a defined area’ of the hospital.”

The IDF brought everything Hamas denied the Palestinian people in the hospital: medical supplies, incubators for babies, and humanitarian aid.

It won’t change all the Jew-haters’ minds, nor the MSM coverage. I wonder, however, if a few of the Palestinians have noted the contrast.

This guy apparently noted something else, though, when interviewed by Al Jazeera in another Gaza hospital:

The Qatari-owned broadcaster interviewed an injured Palestinian man at Al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza on Sunday 5 November.

However, the Al Jazeera reporter cut the conversation short as soon as the man criticised the terror group for hiding among civilians.

“As for the resistance, they come and hide among the people. Why are they hiding among the people? They can go to hell and hide there,” the man said, according to a translation by the Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI) from Arabic to English.

The reporter then abruptly turned away from the man even as he continued to speak, addressing the camera and changing the subject.

The Israelis warned the Shifa hospital that they were coming and when it would happen, giving the terrorists plenty of time to leave and live to fight another day. But if the IDF didn’t give warnings, the entire world would condemn them; plus it would offend their own sense of integrity and human decency.

The warnings also give Hamas a chance to move the hostages elsewhere, of course. At some point they may run out of hiding places, but that could take a long long time, if ever. In the meantime, if any hostages die or are even killed by Hamas, the terrorists can claim it was the IDF that killed them.

But so far the hostages are still worth more to the terrorists alive than dead – at least, I think so. Therefore it stands to reason they will try to keep most of them alive in order to get more bang for their hostage buck, as it were. What the hostages are going through, and have been going through, is unconscionable and horrific to imagine on any level, both psychological and physical. The suffering of their families is intense. Even we who are onlookers find the hostage situation enraging and heartbreaking, but multiply that feeling exponentially for the families.

The ultimate fate of one hostage was revealed as a result of the IDF’s Shifa takeover, however:

No further information on her death has been released so far. RIP.

How many other hostages are dead? When did they die, and how? How are the living ones being treated? And where are they? The public has no idea; I hope that Israeli intelligence does.

Why does Fetterman support Israel so strongly?

The New Neo Posted on by

Senator John Fetterman’s support for Israel is a surprise to many people, because he’s a “progressive” Democrat. These days that seems to go with being anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and in some cases even pro-Hamas. But Fetterman has been something of an Israel booster.

I don’t have any special knowledge that answers the question as to why. But I do have a few observations on the subject. The first is that he has a history of strong Israel support, although of course things like that can change when someone enters Congress and is pressured by the Democratic leadership. In this case the Democratic leadership, Schumer, is at least relatively pro-Israel as well. More significantly, Schumer no doubt realizes that the Democratic Party has a lot of Jewish donors (the Jewish voters constitute a rather small number; it’s the donors that really matter), and he might think that having a visibly pro-Israel Fetterman is a nice foil against people like Tlaib in the House.

Fetterman himself, despite being a leftist Democrat, is also somewhat of an individualist. My sense of him is that he’s not afraid to be different; he is different. His clothing, for example, is very different. His illness makes him different, too, but he was an atypical guy even before that.

No government shutdown for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Congress approved another stopgap measure to avoid a shutdown:

The United States Senate passed a continuing resolution late Wednesday night that will, at least for now, avoid a government shutdown. The bill passed by a margin of 87–11, with 10 Republicans and one Democrat voting no. Republican Senators John Cornyn (TX) and Tim Scott (SC) were absent for the vote. …

…[T]he House of Representatives [had already] approved the measure 336 to 95, with 209 Democrats and 127 Republicans voting in favor of it, giving new House Speaker Mike Johnson (LA) his first big win.

So you might ask: what’s the difference between this and Kevin McCarthy? The difference may be this:

Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., proposed a plan on Saturday creating two separate deadlines for funding different parts of the government to set up more targeted goals to work toward in an effort to prevent Congress from lumping all 12 spending bills into a massive “omnibus” package.

Bills concerning military construction and Veterans Affairs; Agriculture; Energy and Water; Transportation and Housing and Urban Development must be worked out by Jan. 19 while the remaining eight appropriations bills must be decided upon by Feb. 2.

The reality is that the Democrats control the Senate, and although the GOP controls the House it’s by a very slim margin and split between the more conservative and the more GOPe wings of the party. Although we might wish for a magic wand, there’s no getting around those facts. The only way around the situation is to elect more conservatives to Congress, although maybe that would require a magic wand, too.

The UN is the educational propaganda arm of Hamas and other jihadis, training Palestinian children in Jew-hatred for generations

The New Neo Posted on by

And the US has given them the money to do it by its huge monetary support of the UN.

I became alerted to this long ago. I wish I could recall exactly where and when I first read about it, but I came across an article describing this – perhaps in the New Yorker, perhaps in the early 1990s. The piece was about what was taught to Palestinian children in places such as Gaza, and it made my blood run cold. The UN has funded most of these schools, and the curriculum was and still is Jew-hatred of Nazi-level genocidal virulence.

I remember becoming quite frightened even back then, because it was obvious that this was going to bear fruit and, as bad as things already were in that area of the world, they would be getting worse.

I have thought of that article many times in the intervening years. I’ve searched for it, but I’m handicapped by the fact that I have no idea where it was published or exactly when, who wrote it or whether that was the main topic or whether it was tangential to the theme of the piece. It’s the only part I remember.

October 7 made me think of it again. I have little doubt that the terrorists who raped and tortured and murdered and mutilated with such zest and ferocity, and the people who cheered them in the streets of Gaza, had been steeped in the sort of education described above.

Note the cute little girl towards the end of this video:

This is an excellent discussion of the UNRWA Palestinian education problem. The good news, I suppose, is that if someone takes over and changes the education of these kids, the entire situation might at least improve. Towards the end of the video, the speaker describes efforts that have changed Saudi and UAE education for the better. The guy talking about UNRWA has been doing work on this enormously important issue for a long time, and I salute him:

Biden gives aid and comfort to Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

An awful lot of it:

The Biden administration has extended a sanctions waiver that will grant Iran access to roughly $10 billion from Iraq in exchange for electricity purchases.

The 120-day waiver, signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, is identical to one issued in July, but comes amid increased attacks against US forces by Iranian proxies and just over a month after Iran-backed terror group Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7.

I wrote “Biden” in the post’s title, but of course he’s got his pro-Iran advisors.

If you read the fine print, it’s all supposedly limited to being used for “humanitarian” purposes to benefit the Iraqi and Iranian people. If I believed it were possible to successfully limit the regime in that way, I wouldn’t be so incensed. But I don’t believe it’s possible. Here’s one of those cases where I hope I’m wrong, because that money can buy a lot of armaments.

Roundup again

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Some bus drivers in DC refuse to take Jews to the pro-Israel rally. How sweet. The bus company has so far not been named, nor have the drivers. Nor are they described. “DC bus driver” wouldn’t seem to be an especially “woke” demographic of young college students, so it would be interesting to learn more about these bus drivers. One can guess, of course.

(2) These popular new weight loss drugs sound awful, in terms of GI side effects. But what would you expect? There is no free lunch.

(3) For at least 15 years it’s been said that Hamas and other terrorist groups hide in and under hospitals, schools, and the like. Now Israeli forces are planning to take a tour of the enormous complex under Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, as they have with another hospital, Al-Rantis:

A lot of those currently demanding a cease-fire would likely answer, “Leave those operations alone.” That’s a good way to ensure that the threat of Hamas continues. This is the same dynamic as the proposal to deploy U.S. Naval hospital ships off the coast of the Gaza Strip to treat Palestinian children discussed yesterday. Anytime you declare, “Israel will not strike in this spot,” Hamas will move its forces and its equipment to that spot.

Leaving the hospitals alone gives terrorists their safe places, a kind of sanctuary, from which to attack. And yet Israel is sharply criticized for attacking anyone in a hospital, even if the IDF takes extraordinary care to warn and evacuate the patients and staff. But since Israel is sharply criticized for everything it does, at this point the IDF is going forward (after doing things like providing babies with incubators).

By the way, the Brits built the hospital itself, back in 1946 when the country was in charge of Gaza.

(4) Rashida Tlaib is a member of a pro-Hamas Facebook group. Surprise, surprise.

(5) Nikki Haley wants to ban anonymity on the Web. What a terrible idea.

Why are the anti-Israel forces now being open about wanting Israel’s destruction?

The New Neo Posted on by

For many many years the 2-state solution was the mantra of diplomats, the US, the West, and even the Palestinians – when the latter were speaking in English to a Western audience, that is. “From the river to the sea” was heard at times, but it was kept rather hush-hush in general, and the idea of obliterating Israel was more subtle and mostly noticed only by those who delved into Palestinian textbooks or Arab-language speeches. There were pro-Palestinian anti/Israel demonstrations in cities at times, to be sure, but they were usually relatively small.

Campuses were hotbeds of the BDS movement, but like so many dangerous elements of university life it was easy for the mainstream to ignore. And those who advocated all these anti-Israel measures were usually careful to frame them as anti-Israel and anti-Zionist but not – oh no of course not – anti-Jewish.

October 7 put an end to those days of hiding the truth, which is that the movement is and always has been devoted to Israel’s extermination, profoundly anti-Jewish, and the product of a nasty wedding of Islamist jihadi ambition combined with postmodern leftist gobbledygook – the same wedding that toppled the shah and in which the left in Iran was defeated and purged by the mullahs who remained standing, wiping the leftists’ blood off their hands.

That should be a warning to the left as to where their own interests lie right now, but they haven’t learned from history and probably never will. Do they even know history?

So, why is the mask ripped off the pro-Palestinian movement now? They must believe it’s in their interest. Nor are these demonstrations spontaneous. They are well-organized, I suspect by an amalgam of groups from those two entities that form a potent odd couple: jihadis and leftists.

But why the decision to go ahead with such a barbaric and widespread massacre in the first place? I do know some of the ostensible goals of the massacre, which I will list: to derail Israel’s rapprochement with the Saudis; to embarrass and humiliate Israel; to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war and avenge their defeat; to inflict tremendous suffering on Israel, Jews, and their supporters; to take advantage of Iranian coffers filled by Joe Biden’s administration; to take advantage of Israel’s bitter political disarray; and to take advantage of the fact that Biden is weak and probably would not fully support Israel and might even undermine it. In addition, the BLM Floyd protests and riots and the reduction in police forces probably convinced them that subsequent pro-Hamas demonstrators couldn’t or wouldn’t be stopped by the authorities.

All those things seem to be operating. But I still wonder why Iran and Hamas believed that the massacre would help their cause more than it would hurt it. One might think it would undermine them in the eyes of the world, but I suspect that one reason they went ahead is that they know that terrorism and barbarism actually only increase their support on the left (at least, they seem to have worked that way in the past), since the left takes both as evidence of Palestinian sincerity and the depth and intensity of Palestinian despair. Another is that violence sells in the movies, at least to a certain crowd, and the same appears to be true in the real world (alas). Another is that they are sadists and just wanted to do this. There also may be (and probably are) other reasons of which I’m unaware.

Did they kill more people and torture more people and kidnap more people on October 7 than even they expected? Perhaps. I wouldn’t know, but it’s possible, and so perhaps that’s why they didn’t expect quite the strong and determined response Israel has mounted so far. But they also may have calculated that, whatever Israel did or didn’t do, most of the world (and certainly most of the Western MSM) would condemn Israel and support the Palestinian cause. They may have thought that ultimately this would make Israel quit too soon, as it so often has in the past.

And of course, the hostages were the Palestinians’ insurance policy, an actual real-life get-out-of-jail-free card by which they thought they’d get all their comrades back. Why not? It had happened before in a thousand-to-one ratio, and now they had hundreds to exchange.

But once October 7 happened, and the clear-eyed could no longer deny the genocidal intent of Hamas and other Palestinian jihadi groups, and the genocidal sympathies of so much of their brainwashed-from-childhood population, then there would be no reason not to unleash crowds of demonstrators yelling “gas the Jews” and similar Nazi-esque sentiments.

Do they also think they’ve reached some sort of critical mass of power in Europe and the US, due to immigration and the takeover of the universities? Did they also think they needed to strike while Biden was still president, on the off chance that a Republican might get elected in 2024?

Donald Trump’s older sister Maryanne has died: RIP

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump was one of five children, but three of his siblings are now deceased. Only Elizabeth remains.

His other sister died yesterday:

Maryanne Trump Barry, a federal appellate judge and the older sister of former President Donald Trump, has died at age 86.

Barry was pronounced dead at her Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan by medical workers who were called to the scene after 4 a.m. ET on Monday, a spokesman for the New York Police Department told CNBC. There were no signs of trauma or foul play.

Barry was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1999 by then-President Bill Clinton. She largely avoided the spotlight that was constantly pointed at her brother, first as a television host and business personality and then as the president of the United States.

She spent two decades on the Philadelphia-based appeals court before retiring in the midst of a civil misconduct investigation related to her family’s alleged tax-dodging schemes.

In other words, the Feds went after her as part of their vendetta against Trump and his family.

Here’s what Trump himself had to say on the matter – and by the way, the headline for that story is “Trump Breaks Silence On Sister’s Death: Claims Her Life Was ‘Problem Free’ Before His Presidential Run.” Breaks silence? She died only yesterday:

The former president confirmed his sister’s death in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, calling her a “truly beautiful woman, tall and elegant, with a presence like no other,” going on to laud her as a “tremendous student, intellect and Judge.”

Trump also claimed his older sister’s life had been “largely problem free” and “PERFECT” until he “made it difficult for her” by running for president in 2016.

Trump’s strained relationship with his older sister was made known in a set of audio files obtained by multiple outlets from Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, in 2020, in which Maryanne Trump Barry claimed Trump “doesn’t read” and said his presidency had triggered family problems that she said would not end “until he’s out of there.”

That doesn’t seem all that harsh to me on the part of his sister. I don’t think he’s ever held himself out to be a big reader, nor do I care whether he is. And his presidency certainly has triggered problems for everyone in the family, problems which actually have only increased when he left office.

Trump also said this:

In his social media post Tuesday, Trump argued the “Fake News, and others, went after her mercilessly,” adding she was “made to suffer in those years from 2016 until her Retirement.”

I wouldn’t doubt it.

RIP.

Another video roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

I continue to find so many of the videos about the Israel/Palestine conflict to be really worth watching, and so here’s another listing. As usual, if you’re really pressed for time, I suggest you go to Settings and watch either at 1.5 or 1.75 time.

This first one is heartbreaking but also beautiful. What a family:

And these children have witnessed and experienced things that children should never have to go through:

Heroes who deal with the dead:

This group, from something called The Jerusalem Center, isn’t the least bit telegenic (videogenic?), but I’m continually impressed by their content. In contrast with so many others, they seem to know whereof they speak. This particular video focuses on the role of Iran in the October 7 massacre, and the political situation in Iran at present: