More on the hostages

The New Neo Posted on by

It would be nice to have a translation for this. But some things are easy to understand even without one:

On the other hand, Hamas has finally given Israel a list of who is alive and who is dead in the group of 33 to be released in this “deal.” The answer is that 26 are purported to be alive, which is similar to Israel’s previous tally of 25.

The question on many people’s minds, including mine, is whether any members of the Bibas family are on the “alive” list. Israeli authorities are busy letting families know, so my guess is that the general public won’t know till the exchanges all occur.

Meanwhile, Trump has released some bombs that Biden and company had withheld from Israel:

US President Donald Trump said on Saturday night that he had lifted a hold put in place by former president Joe Biden on a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs for Israel.

“A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are on their way!” Trump wrote on his social media app Truth Social, without providing further details.

On the Hegseth confirmation, and especially Murkowski

The New Neo Posted on by

As noted in this post, Pete Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 51/50 with Vice President Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The GOP Senate members who voted “Nay” were Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitch McConnell the former Majority Leader.

Murkowski is the quintessential RINO and yet she’s from a red state, Alaska. You may wonder why she’s still Alaska’s senator. She was first elected in 2002 and has held the seat since then, having won her most recent election in 2022. That means she is up for re-election in 2028, if she decides to run. She’ll be 71 years old then, not especially geriatric by current standards in politics.

But if you look at Murkowski’s election history it’s a bit easier to understand, although strange. She’s the daughter of a well-known and once-popular Alaskan governor who had also been a senator. Her father appointed her to the Senate when he resigned his own seat to become governor in 2002. She was already in politics, however, as a member of Alaska’s House of Representatives starting in 1999. When I say that her father was a “once-popular” governor, I’m referring to the fact that he won the governorship by a wide margin, but by the time he tried to run for a second term he was primaried out and left with the dismal approval rating of 19%.

Lisa Murkowski has held on more or less by the skin of her teeth. (By the way, I don’t usually put anyone down for having failed the bar exam because I’m well aware of how difficult it is, but Murkowski has the distinction of having failed four times and passed only on the fifth try.) For example, when she ran for re-election to the Alaska House in 2000, she won by 56 votes.

When her father appointed her to the US Senate in 2002, many Alaskans were unhappy:

The appointment caused controversy in Alaska. Many voters disapproved of the nepotism. Her appointment eventually resulted in a referendum that stripped the governor of the power to directly appoint replacement senators.

As far as her elections to the Senate go:

Murkowski has had several close challenges but has never lost a general election. She has won four full terms to the Senate; she won 48.6% of the vote in 2004, 39.5% in 2010, 44.4% in 2016 and 53.7% in 2022.

That 2010 race was a three-candidate event in which she was successfully primaried and was not the GOP nominee, but decided to run anyway in a write-in campaign and beat the official Republican nominee, a Tea Party candidate, by a narrow margin. My guess is that the reason for her victory included crossover Democrat votes, people who realized one of the Republicans would win and wanted it to be the RINO. In 2016 it was a four-way race:

[In 2016] Murkowski was re-elected with 44.4% of the vote, becoming the first person in history to win three elections to the U.S. Senate with pluralities but not majorities, having taken 48.6% in 2004 and 39.5% in 2010.[4] Miller’s 29.2% finish was then the best ever for a Libertarian candidate in a U.S. Senate election in terms of vote percentage.

Her 2022 victory was extremely strange as well [emphasis mine]:

This was the first U.S. Senate election in Alaska to be held under a new election process provided for in Ballot Measure 2. All candidates ran in a nonpartisan blanket top-four primary on August 16, 2022, and the top four candidates advanced to the general election, where voters utilized ranked-choice voting.

Murkowski had been a vocal critic of Donald Trump during his presidency and opposed several of his initiatives. Murkowski was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, and was the only one up for re-election in 2022. On March 16, 2021, the Alaska Republican Party voted to censure Murkowski and announced that it would recruit a Republican challenger in the 2022 election cycle. Kelly Tshibaka, a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, was endorsed by Trump and the Alaska Republican Party. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee supported Murkowski.

In addition to Murkowski and Tshibaka, Democrat Pat Chesbro and Republican Buzz Kelley also advanced to the general election. On September 13, Kelley suspended his campaign and endorsed Tshibaka but remained on the ballot. Murkowski received a plurality of first-place votes; however, because no candidate received a majority of the votes in the first round, an instant runoff was triggered. Murkowski won reelection in the third and final round, winning most of the second-choice votes from Chesbro’s voters.

So she won because of Democrat votes, this time without a doubt. She also had the support in that election of none other than Mitch McConnell.

I think that history explains, at least in part, how it is that Alaska came to have Lisa Murkowski as its long-time senator.

For McConnell, I don’t think his vote is any mystery: he hates Trump, and perhaps it has something to do with his financial interests as well.

Susan Collins is much easier to explain. I wrote:

I don’t fault Collins. She’s from Maine. She helps even if she sometimes votes with Democrats, because when she retires she’ll be replaced by a real Democrat.

She has to choose the times she will vote more conservatively, and when it doesn’t matter as much is free to vote with Democrats. She almost certainly was aware of the breakdown of votes, and knew that Vance was available to break the tie.

Commenter “Old Flyer” wrote:

I am not so charitable toward Collins. There are ample opportunities to assuage the Left leaning voters in her relatively tiny constituency; but Hegseth’s confirmation was hanging in the balance. I believe that she is a committed anti-Trumper and will oppose him as long as she feeds at the Senate trough–regardless of the stakes.

I think the answer is as I said above: that she knew it actually didn’t hang in the balance. It’s possible to forget that votes are often known in advance and that members of Congress sometimes vote to make a point when they know it doesn’t matter in the end.

Today is the second anniversary of Gerard Vanderleun’s death

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repost of an essay I wrote a few days after Gerard died. Also, he left instructions to close his blog two years after his death. I plan to do that in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I’m still compiling the poetry book, and I need his blog for that.]

It’s a daily voice, like a friend you talk to on the phone every day. The closest thing to this kind of writing prior to blogging was the daily columnist (when did those go out? or did they ever exist?).

You get to thinking a blogger is someone you know, and although the conversations are a mite one-sided, they’re not totally one-sided because many bloggers interact in the comments as well. And then there’s always email contact, which makes the blogger much more easily accessible than the olden-day columnist.

The writing voices of bloggers are highly idiosyncratic as well. It’s not newspaper reporting, after all, with its pretense of objectivity and impersonality. Also, there’s no middleman or editor. The blogger is all of that rolled into one.

Some bloggers are far more personal in their writing and disclosure than others. Gerard Vanderleun was that way, for example. I’m much more circumspect (remember that apple I hide behind). Then again, even what appears like openness is hardly full disclosure, and bloggers intentionally shape the personae they project. That’s why meeting a blogger in the real world usually causes some feeling of surprise, because the writer is not the person although the person is the writer.

So when a writer dies and that writing voice is stilled, it’s extra-noticeable for the readers. There’s often a pang very much like losing a good friend in real life, a friend with a major daily presence. The blogger has been churning out copy like a machine, usually every day and probably several times a day, often for years or decades. And then suddenly: silence. Utter utter silence.

It’s a very dramatic reminder that death is an abrupt and reluctant parting as far as our lives on earth go, and how powerless all of us are in its face.

[NOTE: For those of you who don’t know the story of why I’m writing about Gerard Vanderleun, please see this.]

Northern New England had an earthquake today

The New Neo Posted on by

A real one, not a metaphoric one.

Fortunately, as with most New England earthquakes, it was small: in this case, 3.8. I didn’t feel it, although I should have, as it was felt from Portland, Maine to Boston:

The quake occurred about 6.5 miles southeast of York, Maine, just before 10:30 a.m., according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which initially reported the magnitude as 4.1 before adjusting the temblor to 3.8.

“Today’s M3.8 near Bar Harbor, Maine, reminds us that earthquakes are unusual but not unheard of along the Atlantic Seaboard,” USGS wrote on X.

The National Weather Service (NWS) in Caribou, Maine, said there was no threat of a tsunami.

That’s a bit strange, since York is quite far from Bar Harbor.

I’ve felt many earthquakes of that magnitude in New England. It’s usually just a gentle shaking which you can miss if you’re in a car or doing something other than just quietly sitting.

Politico seems to be trying out a new stance on Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

This column sort-of lauding Trump appeared in Politico on the 21st. It was written by Politico’s media editor in chief John F. Harris, and is entitled, “Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He’s Still Trying To Be a Good One.” Straddling the fence, but it’s an improvement. The idea is similar to the idea of Time’s “Man of the Year” award, which is that “greatness” is measured by impact, whether bad or good.

An excerpt:

But the second occasion of Trump taking the oath of office also put him in an entirely new light. For the first time, he is holding power under circumstances in which reasonable people cannot deny a basic fact: He is the greatest American figure of his era.

Let’s quickly exhale: Great in this context is not about a subjective debate over whether he is a singularly righteous leader or a singularly menacing one. It is now simply an objective description about the dimensions of his record.

So that establishes the somewhat neutral tone.

There’s also this:

Opponents have no choice but to acknowledge he and his movement represent a large historical argument — and then rally similarly large arguments to defeat it. Trump in 2020 showed himself ready to undermine democracy for his own purposes. Trump in 2024 showed that he is also a potent expression of democracy.

That second sentence reveals Harris’ bias. Did Trump “undermine democracy” in 2020, and did he try to defend it? And what of things like the Hunter laptop coverup; didn’t that “undermine democracy” tremendously, whether or not there was any meaningful fraud in the actual voting? In other words – what is democracy and how does one defend it? If a person truly believes for a host of reasons that an election is rigged, how does one “defend democracy”? That vital issue is ignored by Harris and so many others.

I like this part, though:

Have you ever known someone who was facing legal hurdles? In many cases, even if people ultimately win the case, they end up being consumed and shrunken by the searing nature of the experience. Imagine running for president amid huge civil suits, criminal prosecutions, and even felony convictions — then emerging from this morass as a larger figure than before. No one needs to admire the achievement to recognize that Trump is possessed by some rare traits of denial, combativeness and resilience.

But was it really “denial”? Or was it righteous anger at the kangaroo court proceedings, and faith that truth would ultimately prevail? Is it denial if Trump wins as he seems to have thought he would? Or was it the left that was in denial?

More of Trump’s nominees are confirmed by the Senate

The New Neo Posted on by

Hegseth for Secretary of Defense was the one that was touch-and-go, but although the threesome of Collins, Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell voted “no,” Vance cast the tiebreaker vote and Hegseth is in.

Isn’t it good that McConnell isn’t leader of the Senate GOP anymore?

Kristi Noem is in for head of Homeland Security, all Republicans on board plus seven Democrats. Marco Rubio was already confirmed unanimously, and John Ratcliffe will be in charge of the CIA with a 74-25 vote for confirmation.

It helps to control the Senate as well as the presidency.

Freeing the captive: four more hostages are back in Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

I almost wrote “safe and sound” – but of course, no one in Israel is all that safe as long as the Palestinians are unpacified and Iran is functioning under a vicious theocracy pledged to Israel’s (and the West’s) destruction. And how “sound” they are remains to be seen. But now that they are free they have a chance for healing. The four are Liri Albag (19), Karina Ariev (20), Daniella Gilboa (20), and Naama Levy (20). They were all a year younger than that when captured.

The photos of family reunions are so heartwarming:

The handover from Hamas was much as before, with Hamas playing several roles, including beneficent benefactor, while the previously worse-than-useless Red Cross looked on:

Dozens of armed and masked Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad gunmen formed a cordon around a stage that had been set up in the square. A drone could be seen distributing candy to members of the crowd.

After the arrival of the Red Cross transport, the four hostages were brought into the square in separate vehicles. Dressed in olive garb meant to look like IDF uniforms and clutching “gift bags” from Hamas, the young women were marched onto a stage festooned with English and Arabic slogans such as “Palestine: The victory of the oppressed people vs the Nazi Zionism.”

A large sign in Hebrew also read, “Zionism will not win.”

One of the hostages is more famous than the others:

The image of 19-year-old Naama Levy became symbolic of Hamas’ atrocities on October 7, as a terrorist was seen dragging her by the hair from the back of a pickup truck. Naama’s hands were tied behind her back and her pants were soaked in blood. The Hamas terrorist grimaced at the cameras as he pushed her around at gunpoint.

All four of the young women were taken on October 7, 2023, from the military base at Nahal Oz. You can read about the significance of that here:

The four hostages Hamas released Saturday were taken captive while they were serving as surveillance soldiers stationed at the Nahal Oz military base on the border with Gaza. There, they were tasked with observing suspicious military movement. …

For three months prior to Hamas’ terrorist attack, Karina Ariev, 20, had warned her family of impending war, her sister Sasha Ariev, told the Christian Broadcasting Company, days after her sister was taken.

“They knew something, the girls who were the eyes of the country,” Sasha Ariev said, adding that her sister called her on the morning of the Hamas attack. Sasha Ariev said her sibling told her that she could hear shooting and screaming in the background and received a message from her sister telling her “the terrorists are here.” …

Daniella Gilboa, now 20, had told her commanders in the lead-up to Oct. 7 that she had seen people she suspected to be Hamas militants appearing to prepare for an attack, her mother, Orly Gilboa, said in August on the Meaningful People podcast.

There were few combat soldiers at the base, and the guards were easily and quickly murdered by the terrorists. If memory serves me, the attack occurred when many of the military observers were still asleep in bed, and most of them were killed. These four were captured alive, but my guess is that they saw a great deal of mayhem even prior to their abduction.

Now they are home with their families. At many points it seemed as though that would never happen. But it needed to happen, because there was no way that Israeli citizens would countenance giving up on them and considering them dead.

Many people believe this hostage deal is very bad because it will lead to even more slaughter. But as I wrote last week:

Many people believe that if Israel did not negotiate for the freedom of the hostages, the refusal would end hostage-taking by Islamic terrorists such as Hamas. I disagree. I think hostage-taking is a win for Hamas no matter what happens. They get the pleasure of having total control of the hostages. What a sense of power! That part of their motivation is similar to what drove someone like Ariel Castro, the man who kidnapped and tortured the three young girls in Cleveland, Ohio, for many years.

Not only can the Hamas kidnappers inflict pain and suffering on the hostages, and wield the power of life and death over them and release periodic videos of their pathetic state, but they cause the hostage families and millions of Israels and Israeli-sympathizers around the world to suffer. The taking of hostages – whether Israel bargains for their lives or not – also increases division and anger within Israel. These phenomena are their own rewards to those who hate Jews, Israel, and Israelis. Getting terrorists back in an exchange is a bonus, but it is not the only point and IMHO it may not even be the most major point of the whole undertaking.

Netanyahu added that the incoming Trump administration has promised support for a renewed military offensive if Gaza breaks the agreement (emphasis mine) “If we do have to resume fighting, we will do so in new ways and with very great power.”

Welcome home.

NOTE: For those who haven’t seen this already, I’m publishing it again:

Trump in North Carolina

The New Neo Posted on by

Compare and contrast to the previous administration:

True to his word, Trump, along with First Lady Melania Trump, touched down in the Old North State Friday morning. He was immediately swarmed by the crowd of well-wishers desperate for hope after four months of getting the runaround from FEMA. …

While there, Trump also floated the possibility of either reforming FEMA or getting rid of it altogether, saying states more so than the feds were in a better position to know the needs of their people. He also indicated the money to North Carolina would “go through us” and not FEMA.

Some hostages were held in UN camps – plus, the next group of promised hostage releases

The New Neo Posted on by

Not a suprise:

Reports that freed Israeli hostages had been held in U.N. shelters in the Gaza Strip amount to “a very serious allegation,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told JNS on Wednesday.

“We call on those who have information on this to share it formally with UNRWA or other parts of the United Nations so that we can investigate it further,” Haq told JNS at the global body’s press conference in New York.

Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, who were released on Sunday, said Hamas had held them in U.N. camps that the global body created during the war to protect Gazan civilians and to provide them with food and water.

I get tired of saying that things like this are not a surprise, but they’re absolutely not a surprise to anyone who’s followed the news. The UN camps for “innocent civilians” cannot assure that the people there are not terrorists, and in fact the majority of Gazans are also Hamas supporters. Therefore it’s highly possible that plenty of people in the camps were aware that hostages were there and didn’t tell.

Oh, and having the UN investigate is like having the fox investigate the fowl murders in the henhouse.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and word is that the following hostages will be released:

The families of hostages Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag have been notified that they are expected to be released by Hamas tomorrow.

The four are IDF surveillance soldiers kidnapped by Hamas from the Nahal Oz post during the October 7, 2023, onslaught.

Apparently, the agreement required that civilian females be released prior to female soldiers, and there is still one civilian unaccounted for. That may be considered a violation of the exchange agreement.

Of these four, the most famous (to me, anyway) is Naama Levy. I wrote about her in this post from December of 2023:

Naama Levy was the young woman last seen in a video, being dragged away by terrorists and with the crotch area of her pants bloodied. Here is some slightly encouraging news, courtesy of the freed hostages …

The news was that she was still alive. Apparently, she is still alive; I conclude that only from the fact that it’s been said that live hostages will be released before dead ones.

And what of the Bibas family, with the two tiny red-headed children? I have long thought they are dead, but I fervently hope I’m wrong about that. If they are dead, Hamas will of course claim that they were killed by Israeli bombs.

Here’s a story about the family:

Kfir Bibas, whose second birthday falls on Saturday, is the youngest of the 251 hostages seized by terrorists during Hamas’s brutal and unprecedented attack on southern Israel more than 15 months ago, which killed over 1,200 people and began the war in Gaza.

Hamas said in November 2023 that Kfir, his brother Ariel and their mother Shiri were killed in an Israeli strike, but since the Israeli military did not confirm their deaths, many are clinging to the hope they are still alive.

“To imagine them coming back alive brings me immense joy,” Hila Shlomo, a musician, told AFP at “Hostages Square,” a central plaza in Tel Aviv that has become the focus of protests and campaigns on the captives’ behalf.

“What happened to these children is a symbol, a symbol of man-made evil, but also of the victory of life if we manage to free them, whatever the cost,” said the 23-year-old, visibly moved.

I came across the following video yesterday, and I urge you to watch it even though the subject matter may seem arcane. But I found it fascinating. It’s a rabbi explaining traditional Jewish religious teaching on what price to pay for the freeing of captives: