“If Jimmy jumped off a cliff, would you follow him?”
Iran, Israel, and MAD
So, what’s going on between Iran and Israel after Israel launched a limited strike against Iran?:
The primary target seems to have been air defense systems around the Khatami Air Base near Isfahan. This is one of the bases from which last weekend’s attack on Israel was launched. …
Concurrent with the attack in Iran, Israel hit air defense sites in Syria. There are no conclusive reports of damage caused by any of the strikes. The scope of the attack indicates that Iranian nuclear facilities were not the target.
Neither side is making a big deal of the attack.
Is this just some sort of theater? Or is it a prelude to something bigger? I’m not sure that either side is all that sure at the moment. They’re jockeying for position and sizing each other up.
I’ve long thought that Iran won’t do all that much to Israel – except through terrorist proxies as well as worldwide propaganda – until it has nuclear weapons. Even then, it might hesitate – accent on the might – if it thought Israel would destroy it in return.
I read this interesting article at Ace’s recently. It looks at the big picture:
… [T]he Iranian attack [on Israel] was a three-pronged event using slower drones, faster cruise missiles, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. This was different, not just in who was attacking, but the methodology. The success of the defense has got a lot of people thinking and planning and, frankly, worried.
Worried? Why worried? Wouldn’t a successful defense be a good thing? Well:
The creation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile systems (ABMs) [in the Cold War] resulted in a series of negotiations, because this was destabilized the MAD doctrine. A viable ABM system allows one side to defeat a first strike, then free it to launch a strike of their own– and win. So both sides agreed to stop building and limited themselves to one system. The US put its ABM system around some of the missile fields; the Russians put theirs around Moscow.
Now let’s consider a Regional Conflict. Over time nuclear weapons have proliferated. Pakistan, India, China, France, and Great Britian have nukes, and likely others such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, South Africa (maybe), and presumably, Israel. In the bipolar years, nobody gave much thought to Regional Conflicts. Why? Regional powers didn’t have nukes, so why bother. But not anymore. This begs the question then — and the reason a lot of thinkers are busy late into the night — can a Regional Nuclear War be fought, and won?
That would act as an incentive rather than a deterrent – if a country such as Iran thought that was possible.
More:
Can MAD exist in a regional context? I think it can, but the likelihood of weapon use in oneies and twoies goes up dramatically. More so given there are other delivery options: trains, cars, airlines, etc. Better question is can MAD exist in the Middle East? Just how crazy are the muzzies? This would keep me awake at night.
In the short run, a wider war with Iran doesn’t appear to be happening right now. But the situation is highly unstable, and you don’t need me to tell you that. It’s obvious.
And nukes could and almost certainly would change the whole picture.
ADDENDUM:
Hat tip: commenter “sdferr.”
Fascinating take on it:
Trump at the Harlem bodega
In adversity there can be opportunity. Force Trump to remain in New York City in order to attend his show trial, and he manages to make a clever – and symbolic – campaign stop:
Tuesday, after court, Trump went to Harlem. Talk about grabbing political advantage.
Trump went to the bodega, where, two years ago, a clerk, Jose Alba, stabbed and killed an ex-convict who was attacking him.
Alba was charged with murder. It took three weeks for the radical D.A. Alvin Bragg to drop the charge.
Note the the guy who persecuted Alba was the same person currently persecuting Trump in the NY trial: Alvin Bragg.
More:
Alba had to leave the country. New Yorkers were outraged at the crime and injustice.
That’s the backdrop to Trump’s bodega visit.
[Trump] was greeted by a large and diverse crowd that loved him.
I’m in awe of his energy.
ADDENDUM:
By the way, in case you’re wondering whether the MSM is covering this, the answer is “yes.”
From CNN:
And what CBS has to say.
From the AP:
And what Politico has to say.
Trump knows how to get attention.
The UN once again proves how morally bankrupt it is by saying hey, let’s reward violent terrorists with a state!
And the AP does its thing. I’m referring to the article’s headline: “US vetoes widely supported resolution backing full UN membership for Palestine.” You see, it’s “widely supported” – by the many tyrannies, corrupt banana republics (except ours), failed nations, and enabling and cowardly first-world countries.
The lede:
The United States vetoed a widely backed U.N. resolution Thursday that would have paved the way for full United Nations membership for Palestine, a goal the Palestinians have long sought and Israel has worked to prevent.
Nasty US, nasty Israel, harming the poor suffering Palestinians who so very much deserve UN membership. Actually, the Palestinians are already the greatest beneficiaries of the UN, having been financially supported by UNRWA – and educated in Jew-hatred by UNWRA – for pretty much the duration of Israel’s existence.
More:
The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 12 in favor, the United States opposed and two abstentions, from the United Kingdom and Switzerland. U.S. allies France, Japan and South Korea supported the resolution.
The UK and Switzerland have shown modified and tepid good sense by at least not voting for the measure.
Here’s the official position of the Biden administration:
Since the attacks of October 7, President Biden has been clear that sustainable peace in the region can only be achieved through a two-state solution, with Israel’s security guaranteed. There is no other path that guarantees Israel’s security and future as a democratic Jewish state.
There is no other path that guarantees Palestinians can live in peace and with dignity in a state of their own. And there is no other path that leads to regional integration between Israel and all its Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia.
We also have long been clear that premature actions here in New York, even with the best intentions, will not achieve statehood for the Palestinian people.
“With Israel’s security guaranteed” is the important part. Until that happens, Palestinians will not be living “in peace and with dignity in a state of their own.” And I see no path to that except obliteration of Hamas, and occupation by some entity or entities that will be reshaping the minds of the people there and in particular the coming generations. Tall order, to say the least – taller, I believe, than in postwar Germany and Japan, although at least the number of people involved is much smaller.
At the moment I can’t find the link where I read it, but apparently the US announced in advance of the vote that it intended to use its veto. This had the effect of giving cover to the other nations to vote for admittance or to abstain, saying to the terrorist crocodile: “Please, Mr. Crocodile, please eat me last!” It also allowed the European nations in the Security Council to placate their sizable Muslim populations, knowing that because of the US’s veto there would be no real consequences.
I’m actually surprised that the Biden administration had the cojones to veto the resolution.
The UN has long been in the business of rewarding the worst terrorist attacks of the Palestinians, beginning with the Munich massacre that got so much notoriety and Arafat’s subsequent 1974 appearance there. He addressed the General Assembly, saying, among other things:
Our resolve to build a new world is fortified — a world free of colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism and racism in each of its instances, including zionism.
That’s what the Soviets taught him to say, and he learned his lesson well.
More:
Our world aspires to peace, justice, equality and freedom. It wishes that oppressed nations, bent under the weight of imperialism, might gain their freedom and their right to self-determination.
Sure thing; that’s what the Palestinians want. Every leftist buzzword is there – as far back as fifty years ago.
Actually, Arafat was laughing at them all:
In an article last week about dramatic moments at the United Nations (“Laughter at Trump among a long line of shocking U.N. moments“), the Associated Press covers up the most dramatic element of Yasser Arafat’s 1974 United Nations address: that he brought a gun to the international body and even delivered the address while openly sporting the holster.
In his Sept. 26 article, Tamer Fakahany obscures that Yasser Arafat actually brought his gun to the United Nations and wore the holster during his address, instead presenting the unprecedented nature of his appearance there as relating only to the statement: “Today, I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun.Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” …
(According to an earlier AP report, he was forced to deposit the gun before mounting the rostrum.)
AP’s Sept. 28 2012 account of the same speech explicitly stated in the heading “Yasser Arafat brings his gun to the U.N.” It also contained the key information omitted from last week’s report: “Arafat appeared wearing his gun belt and holster, reluctantly removing his pistol before mounting the rostrum.”
It was a threat from Arafat. He knew how to do political theater, and it has served the Palestinians in their bid to gain sympathy and support from the West while they nurture and act out their destructive and violent hated of Israel, the Jews, and the West.
Open thread 4/19/24
The president of Columbia has her turn before Congress
Minouche Shafik is president of Columbia University, and like the troika of other Ivy college presidents before her who testified before the House about campus anti-Semitism, she recently was interviewed by that legislative body. Shafik had the advantage of having seen her predecessors’ errors, and the reaction to what they said.
However:
Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) asked Shafik during the hearing whether she had seen anti-Jewish protests on Columbia’s campus, to which the university president responded that she had not.
My, my.
Some excerpts from the testimony:
By the way, Shafik is a Muslim who was born in Egypt and came to this country as a young child and went back to Egypt for a while as a teenager. That said, I actually don’t think this has much if anything to do with her stance here. Most of the university heads we’ve heard from – whatever their origins and whatever their religion or lack thereof – have the same lawyerly, evasive, double standards about Jews/Israel versus other groups and countries. If the topic were, for example, anti-black speech and behavior, their answers would be very different and far less equivocal. Shafik is quite typical and not an outlier – in fact she’s probably at least somewhat better (which isn’t saying much), perhaps because she had the advantage of seeing the testimony of the others and had a lot more time to prepare.
The death of Leon Klinghoffer
I happened across an old post of mine (2006) about the Palestinian terrorist hijacking of a cruise ship in 1985, during which they murdered a disabled elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair, named Leon Klinghoffer. The post was also about an opera made on the subject during the 1990s.
I decided to repost the gist of it because I am often struck by the fact that our current Israel/Palestine conflicts and reactions are intensifications of a situation that has been going on in similar fashion for a long time: the cruelty and brazenness of the terrorists, the fact that the legal system in various countries is inadequate and/or unwilling to punish them properly, and the widespread leftist sympathy for their cause and their heinous actions.
So here it is:
Last night [in 2006] was the opening of the controversial opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” at New York’s Lincoln Center. It was marked by protests:
Demonstrators, primarily associated with Jewish groups, plan to rally outside Lincoln Center with 100 wheelchairs, in honor of the slain handicapped Leon Klinghoffer, on whom “The Death of Klinghoffer” is based.
Klinghoffer was hurled from the Achille Lauro cruise ship by PLO terrorists in 1985 after it was hijacked. The opera, which centers on the terrorists who perpetrated the murder, has been accused of glorifying terrorism and incorporating anti-Semitic tropes.
The opera is not new; it was first produced in 1991, and has drawn protests wherever it goes. It’s not hard to see why.
As Thomas Sowell once asked, referring to Klinghoffer’s murderers:
What kind of people would throw an old man in a wheelchair off a cruise liner into the sea, simply because he was Jewish?
The answer, of course, is “terrorists,” and we’ve spent a lot of time and energy in recent years explaining them and fighting them. That they are also human beings doesn’t mean we need to sympathize with them.
I recall hearing the news of the hijacking and the shocking manner of Klinghoffer’s death at the time it occurred, but back then I was unaware of the almost immediate post-modern interest of some in understanding—empathizing with, and even sympathizing with—Klinghoffer’s murderers, or with their “narrative.” In the years since, and especially post-9/11, such enabling attitudes have become only too apparent.
“The Death of Klinghoffer” is an example of the genre. In the olden days, an opera on such a theme might have featured the terrorists as traditional villains steeped in evil, with thunderous and dissonant music to signify the horror of what they did. But in this version they are given sonorous and lovely melodies to sing and sympathetic words to utter. But it wasn’t enough to portray the murderers in a sensitive light; the Klinghoffers and their associates are portrayed less nobly:
More than 20 years ago, in his review of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s premiere of the opera, The New York Times chief music critic, Edward Rothstein, questioned the presentation of Jews and Palestinian Arabs as “symmetrical victims of each other’s hatreds.” Rothstein later wrote that the opera’s depiction of its Jewish characters reduced them “to petty triviality” compared to their Palestinian counterparts.
The opera’s librettist, Alice Goodman, is an interesting tale herself. Born and raised as a Jew in Minnesota, educated in literature at Harvard, married to a British poet, she became an Anglican priest and opera librettist.
You can listen to Ms. Goodman discussing the opera here, in a BBC interview that features a selection from it sung by one of the terrorists. Without even being able to decipher the words of the libretto, just hearing the music and the voice of the kidnapper makes it clear that he is being given a respect and a certain esthetic elegance and dignity that could only serve to elevate him in the eyes of the listener.
Ms. Goodman’s answer to the question of whether the opera is anti-Semitic or an apology for terrorism is an interesting one. She says no (no surprise there); she believes that the charges of anti-Semitism and the rest are a result of her showing the terrorists as “human beings.”
Well, terrorists are most decidedly human beings, as were Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and—well, every other human being who’s ever lived. We all know how Hitler loved dogs, and was a vegetarian. To be evil does not require that one be a devil; being a human being who does evil will suffice. But considering terrorists human beings does not require giving them a forum by writing lovely arias for them to sing.
Ms. Goodman says she speaks not just as the librettist, but as a priest, when she recognizes the perpetrators as human beings with ideals—wrongheaded, yes, but idealistic nevertheless—as though idealism somehow has a value in and of itself. She acknowledges that the music and the words she and her collaborator wrote for the terrorists who killed Klinghoffer were lyrical and heartfelt, and she understands that this fact created “a dissonance difficult for some people to take.”
Indeed. I guess we’re not all highly evolved enough to understand the convoluted mental gymnastics required in comprehending how that doesn’t constitute some sort of sympathy and apology—if not for the devil, then for the human beings who perpetrated this heinous act.
NOTE: More background on Klinghoffer’s death here:
Holding the passengers and crew hostage, [the Achille Lauro hijackers] ordered the captain to sail to Tartus, Syria, and demanded the release of 50 Palestinians then in Israeli prisons, including the Lebanese prisoner Samir Kuntar.
The next day, after being refused permission by the Syrian government to dock at Tartus, the hijackers singled out Klinghoffer, a Jew, for murder [after separating out the American and Jewish passengers into a special group], shooting him in the forehead and chest as he sat in his wheelchair. They then forced the ship’s barber and a waiter to throw his body and wheelchair overboard. Marilyn Klinghoffer, who did not witness the shooting, was told by the hijackers that he had been moved to the infirmary. She only learned the truth after the hijackers left the ship at Port Said. PLO Foreign Secretary Farouq Qaddumi said that perhaps the terminally ill Marilyn Klinghoffer had killed her husband for insurance money. However, the PLO later accepted full responsibility for murdering Mr. Klinghoffer.
Initially, the hijackers were granted safe passage to Tunisia, but U.S. President Ronald Reagan ordered a U.S. fighter plane to force the get-away plane to land at Naval Air Station Sigonella in Italy. After an extradition dispute, Italian authorities arrested and later tried the Palestinian terrorists, but let Abu Abbas fly to Yugoslavia.
I highlighted the above for two reasons. The first is the statement of Farouq Qaddumi. The second is the action of President Reagan.
I wonder if Qaddumi is given an aria in the opera, too.
By the way, this is what happened to Abu Abbas. I hadn’t known these facts when I wrote the original post; I just discovered them:
Muhammad Zaidan (10 December 1948 – 8 March 2004), also known as Abu Abbas or Muhammad Abbas, was (with Tal’at Ya’qoub) a founder of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) Organization. …
On 14 April 2003, Zaidan was captured by American Special Forces in Iraq while attempting to flee from Baghdad to Syria. Italy subsequently requested his extradition. The Pentagon reported on 9 March 2004 that Zaidan had died the previous day, of natural causes, while in U.S. custody. The PLF accused the Americans of assassinating their leader. The U.S. authorities agreed to give Abbas’ body to the Palestine Red Crescent Society for burial in Ramallah on the West Bank. However, his burial there was blocked by the Israeli authorities, and he was buried in the Martyrs’ Cemetery in Damascus instead.
The wheels of justice grind slow, but sometimes they don’t appear to grind at all.
Roundup
(1) Biden gives the Israelis a stern talking-to:
(2) And then there are the tall tales:
His uncle was indeed in a plane that had to ditch over the ocean, in that area of the world, because of engine failure. He was not flying the plane at the time, but I’m going to assume he was indeed a pilot. However, most criticisms of what Biden said seem to ignore a few other things, such as the fact that he said his uncles enlisted right after D-Day. I’m going to assume he meant the attack on Pearl Harbor, because the date of his uncle’s death was May 14, 1944, three weeks before D-Day.
(3) [Hat tip commenter “Barry Meislin”] Gazans sunbathe:
Footage of thousands of Gazans enjoying the beach at Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip caused great anger in Israel.
“While Israeli citizens are preparing bomb shelters and buying generators, and at least 100,000 civilians are evacuated from their homes in the north and south of the country, and most importantly 133 hostages are still in Gaza, residents of Deir al-Balah demonstrate what ‘a step from absolute victory’ looks like,” one social media user commented.
Journalist Barak Ravid wrote: “It must be said that there is no longer a war in Gaza. Maybe there is partial and limited fighting. Maybe Israeli TV channels will also report on this eventually.”
I’ll cut Netanyahu a little slack. There is indeed a pause. If the pause continues too much longer, it’s a very bad idea. But I do think it’s just a pause while they prepare their next step.
(4) What could possibly, possibly, go wrong? In California:
Steven Bradford, a Democratic state Senator for LA County, proposed bill SB 1403 to create a controversial genealogy unit to ‘confirm reparations eligibility’ of applicants.
The state’s first-in-the-nation reparations task force last year decided that some residents should win $1.2 million payouts as compensation for injustices from the slavery era onwards.
But lawmakers have struggled to turn those plans into reality, and have advanced several bills to devise a working reparations scheme amid fears of spiralling costs in a cash-strapped state.
Bradford’s bill, which was amended this month, aims to solve the problem of working out who is in line for a payout.
The Nazis can only envy us the tools we have at our disposal. By the way, most of the American black population (not recent arrivals from Africa) have some white ancestors, and although their percentage of white DNA varies it’s often at least 20% to 50%. And quite a few white people have a percentage – a smaller percentage, but nevertheless a percentage – of black DNA. Nor, of course, does DNA tell the story of whose black ancestors were slaves and whose were not, unless one does an entire family tree going back to the slavery era.
Reparations is a terrible terrible idea on every single level.
(5) How’s that Trump jury selection process going?:
The jury selection process is ongoing, but what began at a fairly brisk pace has slowed somewhat, with two of the previously empaneled jurors being dismissed Thursday morning.
As things sat at the end of the day on Tuesday, seven of the 12 jurors needed had been seated. (Up to six alternates will also be chosen.)
But two of the seated jurors have since been dismissed: one for lying about his arrest history, and one because friends and family had reminded her of some of her previous history (I assume her social media history) that indicated she could not be impartial. Translated, I think this means that she had tweeted or posted on Facebook comments that were either critical of Trump or in favor of him. I don’t know which.
In the first round of jury selection, “over half of the nearly 100 prospective jurors were swiftly excused as they expressed their inability to be fair or impartial.” Another man was dismissed by the judge when Trump’s attorneys dug up this 2017 tweet of his:
Good news!! Trump lost his court battle on his unlawful travel ban!!! Get him out and lock him up.
Had this man already said he thought he could be an impartial juror, prior to the judge’s dismissing him? I don’t know. But it wouldn’t surprise me.
Open thread 4/18/24
An answer to a question a lot of people ask:
My own experience is that there is certainly a somewhat higher percentage of gay male ballet dancers than the percentage of gay people in the general population. But it’s by no means an extremely high percentage. And a heterosexual male dancer is in a fabulous position to find willing female partners, if you get my drift.
Visiting Walmart
A few days ago I went to Walmart to buy some Jazz apples, my favorite variety. These days the only stores that carry them around where I live are Walmart and Trader Joe’s. Another thing I wanted to get was a certain kind of dental floss.
While I was at Walmart I noticed some extraordinary outfits. On people, not for sale on the rack.
The first outfit of note was on a young woman with long purple hair and very dramatic makeup, and a few rings here and there (nose, for example). But that wasn’t what caught my eye. She also had on what I can only describe as some sort of S-and-M costume. It consisted of – I didn’t want to stare although perhaps that’s what she wanted, and so I’m not sure of every detail – some sort of shiny black bra and panties, a little black leather bolero with metal studs, metal armband bracelets, black fishnet stockings, black shiny high-heeled boots, and a whip.
No, just kidding about the whip.
The store was also full of the usual strung-out and wasted middle-aged and older people. Drugs? Poverty? Mental illness? Some combination of all of them?
As I was leaving, ahead of me I saw two women walking. I only saw their backs, so I’m not sure, but I think they were identical twins because they had the same very unusual body. They weren’t especially fat – maybe just a bit overweight, although nothing special – but they had the largest posteriors I’ve ever seen on people whose shape was fairly normal otherwise. These women made Kim Kardashian look very modest in that arena. They had long flowing straight hair, tiny waists, and their legs tapered down rather quickly to thin ankles. None of this would have been so very strange, I guess, had they not been wearing completely form-fitting multi-colored tights of some sort of sparkly shiny stuff, to draw attention to the entire area.
It was – unusual. sort of like horses, from behind. It reminded me of something, and for a moment I couldn’t figure it out. Then I realized it was this:
I left Walmart, went to my car, and unloaded my small bag of groceries. And then I noticed that I’d left the dental floss in the cart and and had never taken it out to buy it. The price was ninety-eight cents, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put it in the trunk and take it. So I thought I’d leave it in the cart and let the store put it back.
At that moment the young woman who worked for Walmart collecting carts came by. “Is that yours?” she asked, pointing at the lonely dental floss in my cart. I explained to her what had happened, and she looked at me in complete puzzlement. “Just take it,” she said. “Nobody’s going to care.”
This was a store employee, and I’m virtually certain she was correct. But it struck me how things have changed; stores have so much theft now that it’s factored in, and the loss of a bit of floss is a joke to them.
I just shrugged and made a sort of hands-up gesture of futility, got in my car, and left.
Uri Berliner resigns from NPR
[NOTE: Please see yesterday’s post for some background.]
Uri Berliner has resigned from NPR:
Longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner, who was suspended after blowing the whistle on liberal bias at the organization, announced Wednesday he has resigned.
“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cited in my Free Press essay,” Berliner wrote in a statement published on X.
It’s interesting that he takes such a mild position about NPR itself, after lambasting it in his recent article that caused so much furor. As I’ve said many times, a mind is a difficult thing to change, even in someone undergoing some sort of mental transition from one point of view to another. Berliner has been at NPR for much of his adult working life and has a great deal invested in believing that its biased coverage is a relatively recent phenomenon although it’s not.
However, I applaud him for his courage in writing his article. I think he must have known it would result in his feeling the need to quit, once he’d burned his bridges that way. Then again, if he really believed in NPR as an institution, he might have been naive enough to think that his article would cause some soul-searching and change for the better there. But the only change it probably caused is that he’s now on the outs.
Get out the vote group is sending unsolicited voter registrations to non-citizens in Michigan
But of course they are.
And no doubt it’s not limited to Michigan:
Documents provided to The Federalist show the form Al-Ani received was sent by the Voter Participation Center (VPC), a left-wing nonprofit that seeks to register Democrat-favorable demographics to vote. On the mailing envelope, the group lists its return address as that of Lansing’s Charles E. Chamberlain Federal Building and U.S. Post Office, which houses tenets such as the Federal Highway Administration.
Al-Ani said he has never engaged with VPC or any other voter registration groups. …
The Voter Participation Center is far from an obscure nonprofit. In fact, it’s a central component of leftists’ well-funded election machine that aims to accrue Democrats a ballot advantage over Republicans ahead of Election Day.
While federal law prohibits 501(c)(3) organizations from engaging in partisan voter registration, left-wing nonprofits such as VPC target demographics likely to vote for Democrats. According to InfluenceWatch, VPC “runs a direct-mail program that targets ‘unmarried women, minorities and millennials’ with voter registration mailings and phone calls.” Critics have described the group’s efforts as “imprecise, misleading, ineffective, and potentially illegal.”
Just now I did a very quick search to see if there are any legal challenges concerning this sort of thing. I couldn’t find any, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If anyone can find more information about it, please post it in the comments.