Gaza/Israel roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) In researching the Constantinople/Istanbul song in this post, I came across this piece of information about the city’s fall to the Ottomans:

The Walls of Constantinople, especially the Theodosian Walls, were some of the most advanced defensive systems in the world at the time. For 800 years, the Theodosian Walls, regarded by historians as the strongest and most fortified walls in the ancient and medieval era, protected Constantinople from attack. However, these fortifications were overcome with the use of gunpowder, specifically from Ottoman cannons and bombards, heralding a change in siege warfare. The Ottoman cannons repeatedly fired massive cannon balls weighing 500 kilograms (1,100 lb) over 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) which created gaps in the Theodosian Walls for the Ottoman siege.

Modern-day Israel had depended on the technology of its border wall to protect it. But the Hamas attack had surprise elements, both in numbers of invaders and techniques used, that overcame Israel’s previously-successful protection. Right now it’s my impression that Netanyahu and the people in his government who were in charge of defense are detested by most of the populace. That’s what I’m hearing, anyway. I believe that the problem was much deeper than Netanyahu; I think any previous leaders would have made the same error.

(2) I also think that the October 7 massacre was more successful than its planners thought it would be. By “successful,” I mean that the IDF was more disabled, and the terrorists had more time to commit murder and mayhem and kidnap more people than even they had expected. I recall reading that the same was true of 9/11; that al Qaeda was trying to inflict a very large blow, but did not expect the buildings to topple. Here’s the basis for the claim:

Osama bin Laden said he was the most optimistic of all his colleagues about the Sept. 11 attacks but not even he dared hope they would bring down the World Trade Center towers, according to a videotape released on Thursday that Washington says seals bin Laden’s guilt.

If this is true – and I happen to think it is – then I don’t believe that either Bin Laden or Hamas thought the response from the US and Israel, respectively, would be quite as extreme as it has been. The US declared war on Afghanistan and invaded the country. Israel has done the same in Gaza. I think that both al Qaeda and Hamas expected responses more in line with those countries’ responses to terrorism in the recent past prior to the attacks.

(3) No one on earth should be surprised by this:

As Israeli ground troops fight their way to the terrorist stronghold of Gaza city, Hamas is using the Biden administration-backed ‘humanitarian corridor’ to sneak terrorists to Egypt. “Hamas tried to smuggle out its people among wounded to Egypt,” the Jerusalem Post reported Saturday, citing an unnamed senior Biden White House official. …

The admission comes as Israeli military exposed that Hamas was using Gaza medical services to move terrorist and weapons across the battlefield. Israeli news website Ynet reported Saturday that “the IDF has information suggesting that the terrorist organization utilized the ambulance for transporting terrorists and weaponry.”

There would be no reason to think otherwise. Biden is placating his left flank while sacrificing Israel’s security.

See also this.

(4) Sinema vs. Tlaib on “the river to the sea.” She counters Tlaib’s ridiculous claim that using the phrase – as Tlaib did – means supporting “freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.”

(5) Here are a bunch of videos to watch.

Say what you will about Ben Shapiro, he’s excellent on the topic of Israel

Ishmael and Isaac and a lot more:

The Nakba’s actual history:

Here’s a brave woman:

As expected, Biden and company want a “pause” by Israel: politics and psychological warfare

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden call it a “humanitarian pause,” of course. And indeed, it would be very kind to Hamas. But remember that old saying, “Whoever is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind.” An actual humanitarian pause would involve Hamas removing its arms and terrorists from close proximity to its citizenry, as well as returning the hostages. The sort of “pause” Biden and company are suggesting allows Hamas to regroup as well as to steal whatever humanitarian aid is supplied, as is its wont.

Netanyahu has responded to the call by saying no to a pause or to fuel delivery. Neither would even be considered till the hostages are freed. Meanwhile the MSM keeps the “poor Gazans” news coming, printing as truth the numbers of civilians killed issued by none other than Hamas. And – as Ace points out here:

No American news channel reported Hamas’s declaration that they would conduct 10/7 slaughters forever — “10/7, 10/10, 10/one million,” Hamas’s spokesterrorist promised — until Israel was “annihilated.”

Except for NBC, unbelievably, which made a fleeting reference to it.

Without that all-important context, they can be more successful at making the Israelis look intransigent and Biden look magnanimous.

To add to the absurdity, Blinken called for the now completely discredited “two-state solution.” Are they that foolish, or perhaps that knavish? It’s hard to choose, so let’s not and just say “both.” And it’s fairly clear that what motivates them is internal politics. Biden and his advisors are well aware that his support for Israel has lost him prospective votes from the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic wing of his own party, which is rather large.

And by the way, the right definitely has such a wing as well, although its arguments and motives are somewhat different and it has less support from actual politicians on the right. It’s smaller than that of the left and less of a political force. But the anti-Israel and/or anti-Semitic right is described in some detail here, and I can attest to its existence from comments I’ve seen all around the blogosphere.

Israel has long had a public relations information war problem. As I’ve written before, that is the topic of the work of Richard Landes, the man who invented the term “Pallywood” and exposed the al Durah hoax, as well as coining the phrase “lethal journalism” for much of the MSM coverage of Israel. Yesterday I happened across a video with another expert on the subject, an Israeli named Ron Schleifer who studies psychological warfare. I found his talk fascinating and illuminating, although depressing (again, I suggest you watch the video speeded up to at least 1.5 time, which you can do by going to the video settings):

That information war is at the heart of so much that is happening today, and not just in Israel and Gaza. It is a big part of the psychological battle between left and right, a war that so far the left has been winning.

And then there’s Bukele of El Salvador

The New Neo Posted on by

Until now, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador hasn’t appeared on my radar screen. Seeing that photo at the link, my first thought was how very young he looks.

It sounds as though, on the whole, his presidency has been good for El Salvador; at least, the Salvadorans appear to think so because he’s wildly popular and will probably be re-elected. The Biden administration doesn’t like him:

In his four years in office, President Nayib Bukele has turned El Salvador from a dangerous place filled with corruption, crime, and MS-13 gang members to a tropical paradise. Now, with his signing up for a historic re-election bid, he’s transforming El Salvador’s election system so he can do more.

This last week, Bukele officially registered to run for a second term, which hasn’t happened in El Salvador’s history due to a law that prevented any president who served from applying for office again. El Salvador’s Supreme Court changed the law in 2021, ruling that Bukele would be eligible to run for re-election. With almost every other democratic nation allowing for a president to serve a second term, the law seemed absurd, and with Bukele posting a 90% approval rating among Salvadorans, he faced little opposition to the constitutional change. However, it hasn’t stopped the foreign media, particularly in the United States, from criticizing Bukele and comparing him to authoritarian dictators in Central America’s past.

In addition to his youth (he’s 42), another thing that caught my eye is his name. It’s not Hispanic. I wondered whether he was an Arab, or even Palestinian, and although that seemed unlikely it turns out to be true:

Bukele’s paternal grandparents were Palestinian Christians from Jerusalem and Bethlehem while his maternal grandmother was Catholic and his maternal grandfather was Greek Orthodox. …

Bukele studied law at the Central American University, but later ended his studies and founded his first company at age 18.

… Bukele was born [in El Salvador] into a Christian household, although his father converted to Islam later in life. As the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, Bukele’s religious beliefs were a controversial subject in the 2019 election, with an image surfacing showing Bukele praying at the mosque in Mexico City. In February 2018, The Times of Israel published an image of Bukele “in deep reflection at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City.” …

Bukele has publicly stated he considers himself a believer in God first rather than religion. In a 2015 interview he said that “I am not a person who believes much in the liturgy of religions. However, I believe in God, in Jesus Christ. I believe in his word, I believe in his word revealed in the Holy Bible. And I know that God does not reject anyone because of their origins.”

His wife is apparently part Sephardic-Jewish.

Interesting guy. In that Wiki link, you can read of the many differing opinions and controversies his tenure has raised. He even sounds in some ways like a Trumpish figure.

Sam Bankman-Fried has been convicted on all counts

The New Neo Posted on by

And the jury didn’t deliberate very long to return the verdicts:

Bankman-Fried was charged with seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in what federal prosecutors have described as “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.”

He was accused of using customer deposits on the crypto trading platform FTX to cover losses at his hedge fund, pay off loans and buy lavish real estate, among other personal expenses. …

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said the verdict sends a message “to every single fraudster out there who thinks that they’re untouchable.”

He could be sentenced to up to 110 years, and he faces additional charges in another trial. His defense in this one amounted to claiming he didn’t know the significance of what he was doing. However, others testified against him in order to get plea deals:

Caroline Ellison, the former co-chief executive of Alameda and Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, previously pleaded guilty to criminal charges and testified under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors. She has testified that she committed fraud with Bankman-Fried and at his direction.

Ellison additionally testified that Bankman-Fried believed in utilitarianism and thought rules against lying or stealing inhibited his ability to maximize the greatest benefit for the most people.

I have to say first that although I followed Bankman-Fried’s original arrest, I haven’t followed his trial. But I’ll add that in general I don’t like it when the entirety of the evidence against a defendant is the result of confederates trading testimony for plea deals. I know it’s done all the time as a very basic prosecutorial tool – and I think it’s highly likely that in this case the ex is telling the truth, because Bankman-Fried’s claim of ignorance just doesn’t seem plausible. And perhaps there’s plenty of other evidence to corroborate what the ex and the other plea-dealers are saying.

Assuming Ellison’s story is the truth, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the way Bankman-Fried reasoned and rationalized his behavior: utilitarianism. That’s a topic I’ve discussed in before, this post (first in a series of three) from 2015.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go again – so much news!

(1) The UN is a travesty, and not a funny one:

In the worst decision by an international body since the League of Nations looked at the rise of Adolf Hitler and said, “I’m sure everything will turn out fine,” the United Nations has handed the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum to Iran.

(2) An editor of the Harvard Law Review, Ibraham Bharmal, is apparently one of several people who recently assaulted a Jewish man on campus. Bharmal is an activist and a member of CAIR, which is an organization that has been linked with Hamas, although the group denies it.

Another Harvard student associated with the assault is Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a divinity school student who lives with university undergraduates as a sort of advisor.

Divinity school.

(3) Biden wants a ceasefire. I hope Israel doesn’t listen to him; it depends how hard he and/or his aides push and threaten. Perhaps he wants to level the playing field between Israel and what he has called “the other team.” Quite a sports metaphor. Or perhaps he’s not serious and is merely trying to appease the Democrats’ very large anti-Israel Left flank.

(4) The American Ornithological Society is eliminating misogynist and racist names from birds. WTF? For example, Audubon was a slave holder, so out with him!

(5) Trump says his children are being persecuted in the NY fraud trial. I think that is obviously the case; his entire family is in the Left’s crosshairs and has been since the beginning. To the Left, persecution of the family is a feature and not a bug.

This video explains a lot about the high incidence of Muslim Jew-hatred

The New Neo Posted on by

Many or perhaps even most of you may know this already. But it’s certainly not common knowledge. It’s a good summary of how Islam is the problem. You might want to send the video to other people who are unaware of what’s going on regarding the education of young Muslim children in murderous hatred of Jews. I first read of the phenomenon back in the 1990s and became alarmed about it, and I was right to be alarmed:

Why does the left rip down the posters of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no puzzlement why Palestinians or other Arabs in this country might do it. But what about the non-Arab contingent ripping down these posters?

Jeff Jacoby has an explanation, and I think he’s spot on:

The posters went viral overnight. Within days they were appearing everywhere, a powerful symbol of Israel’s anguish and of the desperate yearning for the captives’ safe return. Then came the backlash. “Within minutes or hours of going up,” reported the New York Jewish Week, “many of them had been partially ripped off the subway station’s walls, tears obscuring the victims’ faces or details about their lives, while others were defaced with marker or surrounded by messages such as “Free Palestine.” On a poster of two of the youngest hostages, 3-year-old twins Emma and Yuli Cunio, Hitler mustaches were drawn on the girls’ faces. On other posters, the words “Lies” or “Actors” were scrawled. …

The “Kidnapped” fliers are intolerable to the haters because they so urgently challenge the antisemitic paradigm. They make it vividly clear that in the war between barbarism and civilization, between oppressor and oppressed, it is Jews who are under attack. That infuriates those whose worldview revolves around the certainty that Israel and its supporters are the victimizers. The outpouring of sympathy for Jews kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — and the moral force of that sympathy — is anathema to them.

The idea that Jews might be victims has caused many people the world round to rip off the masks of civilized pretense – the excuse that their hatred of Israel had nothing to do with hatred of Jews. Clearly, it has everything to do with hatred of Jews.

This also harks back to yesterday’s post of mine on oppressors versus the oppressed. Simply put, the left only cares about two categories of people, oppressed and oppressor. The Palestinians have long been defined as oppressed, which means that anything awful they do cannot be judged as bad; it is always the fault of the oppressor. The left defines Israel as the oppressor. Therefore, the crimes of Hamas and the jubilation of the Palestinians about those crimes cannot be acknowledged as such because that would upset the groups’ placement in the all-important hierarchy of victimhood.

Israelis cannot be oppressed; they are always oppressors. Therefore obvious victims such as those on the posters must be denied and canceled, and reminders of their victimhood cannot be allowed to be seen and/or must be denounced as lies.

Jews as victims creates cognitive dissonance with previously held notions by leftists of the way the world works, and the place of different groups in it. Cognitive dissonance is intolerable for most people, and they will do almost anything to resolve it, including denying incredibly strong evidence.

The Left cares nothing about Muslim-on-Muslim killings …

The New Neo Posted on by

… just as it cares nothing about black-on-black killings in the inner cities.

The only killing of a Muslim that concerns the Left is if a Jew does the killing, or a Western nation does the killing.

The only killing of a black person that concerns the Left is if a white person (or an Asian, defined as “white adjacent,” or a “white Hispanic”) does the killing.

There is a pattern here, which is that the Left pretends to care about Muslims who are killed or black people who are killed. But it does not. It cares about who it can blame.

In Yemen, a civil war has been ongoing for nine years:

According to the UN, over 150,000 people have been killed in Yemen, as well as estimates of more than 227,000 dead as a result of an ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities due to the war.

But I haven’t heard a peep about it from our Left. Have you? In Syria, likewise, although that one’s been going on since 2011:

The war has resulted in an estimated 470,000 – 610,000 violent deaths, making it the second deadliest conflict of the 21st century …

Look at those numbers. Whether they’re exact or not, clearly the number of dead is high. We do hear about Syria now and then, but mostly because the US backs some of the parties, as do Russia, Turkey, and Iran. Both of these conflicts, as well as others, dwarf the Iraeli-Palestinian one in terms of deaths. But because Israel can be demonized in the latter conflict, it gets the attention and the Palestinians are the favorite victimized group of the left and academics (redundant, I know) and of the Muslim world.

NOTE: I wrote the above last night as a draft. Today I saw this post by Stephen Green on the very same topic:

While the Israeli-Hamas war garners all the attention … “No Jews” [trending on “X”] shows that, even with a brutal war raging, Gaza doesn’t even top the list of how bad Arabs have it…

…at the hands of their fellow Arabs. For much of the Islamic world, Israel serves as both a convenient distraction and a convenient excuse from just how badly most of the so-called “house of peace” (Dar al-Islam) runs its affairs.

For every leftie complaining about Israeli’s treatment of Gaza Palestinians, there is exactly zero taking public notice of how they’re being treated in Syria. …

If author and former Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters is correct, the violence would only grow worse if Hamas or Iran were to succeed in wiping Israel from the map. “The destruction of Israel,” he wrote in the afterword to “The War in 2020,” would be “less likely to trigger Islamic unity than to utterly dissolve it. Unable to direct their frustrations at the Zionist devil, the Islamic nations of the Eurasian landmass would quickly rediscover the holy and delectable mission of slaughtering each other over trivia.”

Excellent point.