Personal note
These days the news is overwhelming in at least two ways. The first is that it’s incredibly upsetting, and “upsetting” is really way too mild a word for what I mean. Distressing, devastating, horrific, frightening, , nightmarish, foreboding – words seem inadequate.
The second is that the sheer volume of news makes it difficult to know what to focus on in my writing. I must have at least thirty or so drafts for posts just on the topic of the Hamas/Israel situation since October 7. Some of those posts will probably never see the light of day and some will.
So if I miss big topics at times, I’ll just say that I’m well aware of it.
Hope you’re all okay.
Airplane sabotage attempt by off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot
An off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot was charged with 83 counts of attempted murder for allegedly trying to shut down a plane’s engines midflight on Sunday.
The big picture: Joseph David Emerson, 44, was riding in the jump seat of Alaska Airlines flight 2059 from Everett, Washington, to San Francisco and was subdued after attempting the shutdown, the company said.
Two observations of mine.
The first is that there is a precedent in this extraordinary case, although in the former incident it was not a passenger plane but a FedEx flight:
My second observation is that Emerson sounds like a regular guy:
Neighbors described Emerson as a “positive, very friendly, upbeat,” father of two.
On a quiet street in Pleasant Hill, Emerson, his wife, and two young sons live in a one-story house decorated with Halloween ghost, tombstone, and skeleton displays on the front lawn..
There’s a photo there of Emerson, whose face and expression arouse no red flags. So, what’s the deal? Well, the FedEx flight perp had a previously good resume but recently was about to face a disciplinary procedure and was apparently afraid of losing his job and worried for his family’s financial future. That was his motive:
Also in the airplane was 42-year-old FedEx flight engineer Auburn Calloway, an alumnus of Stanford University and a former Navy pilot and martial-arts expert, who was facing possible dismissal over falsifying of his flight hours. To disguise the hijacking as an accident, so his family would benefit from his US$2.5 million (equivalent to $4.9 million in 2022) life-insurance policy, Calloway intended to murder the flight crew using blunt force. To accomplish this, he brought on board two claw hammers, two club hammers, a speargun, and a knife (which was not used) concealed inside a guitar case. He also carried with him a note written to his ex-wife and “describing the author’s apparent despair”. Just before the flight, Calloway had transferred over US$54,000 (equivalent to $106,600 in 2022) in securities and cashier’s checks to his ex-wife.
My guess is that there’s some version of that for Emerson.
A Muslim speaking out
I’ve seen others, too.
ADDENDUM:
In response to some of the comments, I’ll add that of course her speaking out doesn’t change anything regarding jihadis, their goals, and their grip on so many ordinary Muslims. Nevertheless she models the possibility of disagreement within the faith. She is hardly alone, either. But the reason I included this video is because I often read commentary on the right side of the blogosphere saying something like, “Where are the moderate Muslims? Why aren’t they speaking out? I haven’t heard or seen a single one.”
They indeed exist. The problem is that they don’t seem to matter much if at all. That doesn’t negate the fact of their courage.
The differences between the jihadis and the Nazis
I’ve already pointed out that one difference is that the Nazis tried to keep their crimes quiet, while Hamas proudly records its murders and atrocities and disseminates the videos worldwide.
Here are a few more differences.
(1) It’s my impression that although both the Nazis and Hamas jihadis were/are into torture, Hamas seems to prefer to torture a larger percentage of its victims, up close and personal.
(2) The Nazis killed about 2/3 of the Jews of Europe and approximately 1/3 of the Jews who had been alive in the entire world prior to the war. I don’t know what percentage of world Jewry has been killed in terrorist attacks by Hamas and other jihadis up to and including October 7, but it’s nowhere near a match to the efficiency of the Nazi Jew-killing machine. However, jihadis have the very same ambition: to eliminate Jews from the face of the earth. They also want to kill quite a few Christians along the way; maybe ultimately all of them, too, if they won’t convert.
(3) To accomplish the Holocaust the Nazis had to conquer country after county in Europe and conduct a staged roundup operation, usually with the cooperation of at least some of the locals. Some countries’ populations of non-Jews refused to cooperate, although that refusal was only successful in certain countries the Nazis were occupying with a temporarily lighter touch. But the whole thing was hard work for the Nazis. The jihadis have it much easier because many of the world’s Jews are concentrated in a very small area: Israel, surrounded by enemies.
(4) The Nazis were a German national party and although they had allies, Nazism wasn’t much of a movement worldwide. Muslims, however, represent about a quarter of the world’s population. What’s more, there are sizable numbers of Muslims in Western Europe and the US. What percentage of these Muslims support Hamas? I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s correct to say that percentage is very significant, given the extent of the demonstrations and the quality of the statements of Muslim leaders in many countries. And, for example, here’s a poll of Muslims in America:
A majority of Muslim-Americans agree that Israel has a right to defend itself, but in stark contrast to other demographic groups, a majority disagree that Israel should invade Gaza, and a majority agree that Hamas was justified in its attack on Israel.
(5) And then there is the left and the biased anti-Israel MSM. During WWII the left was with the Nazis while the USSR was allied with them, but after that the left was anti-Nazi (very flexible of them). Now much of the left is not just anti-Israel but pro-Hamas or at the very least in Hamas-atrocity-denial.
(6) In addition, we have the UN:
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres accused Israel of violating international law in its retaliation against the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip and called for an immediate truce that would leave the terrorist organization in power after it massacred over 1,400 Israelis in the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
“I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza. Let me be clear: No party to an armed conflict is above international humanitarian law,” Guterres said during a Security Council meeting on the Gaza conflict.
Israeli officials railed at UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Tuesday after he appeared to suggest the impetus for the Hamas terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel was the Jewish state’s continued control of Palestinian territories.
“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said at a UN Security Council meeting on the Israel-Hamas war, which erupted when the terror group ravaged Israeli border communities, killing some 1,400 people, the vast majority of them civilians.
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” Guterres said. …
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres accused Israel of violating international law in its retaliation against the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip and called for an immediate truce that would leave the terrorist organization in power after it massacred over 1,400 Israelis in the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
“I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza. Let me be clear: No party to an armed conflict is above international humanitarian law,” Guterres said during a Security Council meeting on the Gaza conflict.
Please read the whole thing, if you can stomach it. Guterres has apparently been reading The NY Times.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken held “listening sessions” with Muslim, Arab-American and Jewish staffers amid growing internal frustration over the department’s handling of the war in Israel and Gaza.
The meetings came after a State Department official resigned in protest this week over continued US support for an Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip that the Hamas-run health ministry says has killed more than 4,000 people.
On Friday afternoon, Blinken met with a small group of State Department staffers who are members of two Arab-American and Muslim employee organizations.
I doubt they’re upset that the US isn’t supporting Israel more and taking the gloves off.
NOTE: So far, all the casualty statistics of Palestinians in Gaza as a result of Israeli airstrikes have come from Hamas. There is zero reason to believe their figures, based on past experience with their lies. The MSM could be helpful in making that very clear. Instead, it generally does the opposite.
Open thread 10/24/23
Giant dahlias:
TIME magazine and the poor Gazans
Here’s an article from TIME that’s an example of the reporting on Israel and Gaza:
The Gaza Strip has endured seemingly endless tragedy. As Israel wages its war to root out Hamas in the aftermath of the latter’s Oct. 7 massacre, which killed 1,400 in Israel, at least 3,700 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. A blast at Al-Ahli hospital where many Gazans had sought refuge resulted in the loss of as many as hundreds of lives.
“Endless tragedy,” so much of it at their own hands and because of what they themselves have done.
Like most of the MSM, TIME reports on the number of Gazans killed so far since October 7th. Where do they get these figures – which vary from paper to paper, but are usually presented as some sort of verified truth although the source is rarely given? When given, the source is usually the Gazan health ministry, which lied about the hospital strike and one can assume has reason to lie about the total death toll as well.
What’s more, we also know that the hospital attack from an errant Palestinian rocket was not a one-off; Palestinian rockets are known to commonly fall inside Gaza and injure or kill civilians there. To Hamas, it’s all good, because all dead bodies can be blamed on Israel and outlets such as TIME will report it uncritically. What the real figure of dead killed by Israel might be is unknown.
In that TIME article there is no description of the horrific October 7th massacre; just the death toll. And that death toll is merely compared to the supposed number of Palestinians killed by Israel, the latter number being higher. Nor is there any statement about how many of those Palestinians killed were Hamas and how many civilians, or whether the number has been substantiated in any way. The entire statistic is reported in a manner most favorable to the narrative of Palestinian suffering being greater than that of the Israelis, and that Palestinian suffering is being caused by acts of the Israelis.
There’s much more, including interviews with many Palestinians, all of whom are remarkably attractive. The first interview is with a doctor who was at the al-Ahi hospital when the errant rocket hit the parking lot. It contains a description of the terrible burns and wounds, some suffered by children. It does at least say the parking lot was hit rather than the hospital itself – without acknowledging the original lie that traveled around the world. But there isn’t any mention of who launched the rocket, and because of that omission a reader would ordinarily think that it was Israel.
There is no attempt by the reporters to confirm anything their subjects say. The people are just quoted uncritically, and the reader is given no reason to distrust the information they offer. It is really a remarkable piece of MSM propaganda in the service of Palestine and Hamas.
George Floyd revisited
George Floyd’s death has been in the news again recently because Tucker Carlson did a segment claiming he wasn’t murdered:
Carlson said that, thanks to this new information, it is now “conclusively” known that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is serving over 20 years in prison, did not murder Floyd by kneeling on his neck for several minutes on May 25, 2020.
Hennepin County Prosecutor Amy Sweasy, who is in the midst of a lawsuit against her boss, alleged in her deposition that an autopsy found no indications that Floyd was murdered. …
Sweasy said in her deposition that Dr. Andrew Baker, the medical examiner who performed Floyd’s autopsy, withheld and lied about the true cause of death as he feared the public’s reaction. He allegedly told Sweasy that the autopsy results contradicted the public’s narrative.
“He said to me, ‘Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?’ … and then he said, ‘This is the kind of case that ends careers,’” the deposition reads.
Sweasy’s deposition is new and I suppose it’s news. But evidence that Baker’s original evaluation of Floyd’s cause of death was that it was not strangulation was known as long ago as May of 2021, and at that time it was also alleged that Baker had been coerced and threatened to get him to say otherwise.
I’ve written a ton of posts about George Floyd’s death and the trials of Chauvin and the others. I’ve read many detailed reports on the trials, I’ve read the entire transcript of the interactions between Floyd and the police that day, I’ve read the recommendations that were in place at the time of Floyd’s death for Minneapolis police when attempting to restrain offenders, I’ve read the autopsy, and I’ve written about all those things in great depth. I concluded long ago that Chauvin did not murder George Floyd, and that the trial was unfair for a host of circumstances including the fever pitch pressure of the public and press that had concluded otherwise on the basis of the video of Chauvin restraining Floyd.
However, I don’t think there’s anything on earth at this point that would change the general public opinion that Floyd was murdered and that Chauvin was the perp. The fallout from that perception – not just in the US but around the world – has been incredibly destructive.
Does Israel have a “winnable solution”?
Today I spoke with a Christian missionary based in Libya who said that if Israel forced Gaza to buckle under siege, that would be perceived by the man-on-the-street Muslim as unfair collective punishment.
Me: “Then is there no winnable solution for Israel?”
Him: “If the IDF invaded Gaza, went house to house, and specifically went after Hamas and spared civilians, that would be considered fair.”
If he’s right, then there’s no winnable solution for Israel that is not also extremely costly.
I’m always puzzled when I hear reasoning of that general sort: “If Israel did x, the Muslim street would get angry; but if Israel did y, the Muslim street would be okay with it.” I’m also puzzled by suggestions that Israel do what is literally impossible to accomplish, such as going house to house and killing not a single civilian but only Hamas members.
I’m not based in Libya. I’ve never even been there or to any Arab country. Nor am I a Christian missionary, or even a Christian. But it seems glaringly obvious to me that the Muslim street considers everything Israel does to protect itself to be not just unfair but an evil abomination. Also, the Muslim street does not consider anything Israel does to protect itself to be fair. If a single Muslim is killed by Israel, that is unfair and evil – and in fact if no Muslims are killed by Israel, Hamas and others will lie and say that they were. If a single Muslim’s home is destroyed even if no one is in it, that is unfair and evil.
If Israel exists, that is unfair and evil.
I’m not saying that every Muslim in the world thinks that way; of course that’s not the case. But it’s not required that every Muslim in the world think that way – or even the majority of them – for things to be extremely dire, because a huge number of Muslims do indeed think that way. And they are willing to kill for it and die for it and lie for it. In addition, much of the Western world seems to have been convinced that they’re correct to do so.
So even though I don’t think that Bill K’s missionary friend is correct, I think that Bill K himself is much closer to being correct when he writes, “there’s no winnable solution for Israel that is not also extremely costly.” In fact, I can’t come up with a “winnable solution” for Israel, period. Fortunately, no one is depending on me for strategy.
Open thread 10/23/23
But at my back I always hear…
…Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near…
As I get older, it increasingly seems to me that the world divides itself into two kinds of people. There are those who look back and say, “I’ve had a good life and wouldn’t change a thing.” And there are those who are filled with regret for what might have been and sorrow over much of what actually was.
Maybe there are always those two kinds of people at all ages, not just as one gets older.
But I wonder.
I think that the two groups reflect a very real difference in life’s trajectory. Some of it is innate personality, but some of it is luck, bad or good, that can set the course and be somewhat self-perpetuating.
Not that one’s luck can’t be changed. But as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, sometimes luck breeds more of the same sort of luck, both good and bad. Tracks get more deeply rutted; opportunities close down or get fewer. Reputations are built or destroyed. Sorrows and travails can be hard to overcome except for the most psychologically and physically resilient among us. Families and spouses either support or hinder or are indifferent. Friends come and lead to more friends or move away or die or look elsewhere for companionship. Circles of help expand or close down and are harder to rebuild. Chronic illness cuts one off. Marriages set a prevailing tone and bring a person down or lift that person up.
Yes, we make our fates to a certain extent. But I think that extent can be somewhat overestimated, except for extraordinary people. And those people often also have some sort of charismatic personality that draws people to them no matter what.
Lucky people often think they create their own luck. And perhaps they do. Or at least partially. Or perhaps they don’t. Having a loving famiy isn’t something a child creates, for example, but it affects people for the rest of their lives, however short or long they may live.
William Blake’s poem “The School Boy” is about a stifling educational experience. But it could just as easily be about a family, particularly that last verse, addressed to parents:
…How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring!O father and mother if buds are nipped,
And blossoms blown away;
And if the tender plants are stripped
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay,-How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?
Palestinian work permits: a Trojan horse?
The coverage from CNN:
The men in the wedding hall at the Dheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank spend most of their days and nights glued to their phones, smoking, constantly refreshing their news feeds. They look exhausted, the horrors of the last few days clearly visible on their faces.
These 180 men – they are all men – are refugees from Gaza. They are among the roughly 18,000 residents of the enclave who have Israeli work permits and are allowed to cross the border back and forth. When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shut all access to Gaza following Hamas’ deadly attack last Saturday, these men became stuck.
Way way down in the article you read this:
Israel began issuing thousands of work permits for Gazans to cross into Israel as part of an economic incentive strategy Israeli authorities had hoped would deter Hamas from further armed conflict.
The whole article is about “the poor poor Palestinians,” and the only mention of the reason they are detained is the phrase “Hamas’ deadly attack” – an attack that isn’t further characterized or discussed. It’s not even called a “sneak attack,” or “brutal attack”, or an “attack on civilians.”
Here’s another piece on the anguish of Gazan workers expelled from Israel. It’s behind a paywall, so I can only see the beginning, but it looks quite similar:
The 48-year-old Gazan is one of the few thousand Palestinians from the enclave authorized to work on the other side of the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel. After the deadly Hamas attack on October 7, in the villages near the border, these workers were either expelled to the West Bank by Israeli police or voluntarily sought refuge there for fear of reprisals.
And note the same language: “deadly Hamas attack” – as though it was just rockets, or soldiers attacking soldiers, and we aren’t even told exactly who attacked.
And yet Reuters surprises by coming through with some context. The article was written early on, before the “poor Palestinians” narrative really got going, during the brief “poor Israelis” moment shortly after the attack:
Saturday’s assault, the worst breach in Israel’s defences since Arab armies waged war in 1973, followed two years of subterfuge by Hamas that involved keeping its military plans under wraps and convincing Israel it did not want a fight.
While Israel was led to believe it was containing a war-weary Hamas by providing economic incentives to Gazan workers, the group’s fighters were being trained and drilled, often in plain sight, a source close to Hamas said.
In one of the most striking elements of their preparations, Hamas constructed a mock Israeli settlement in Gaza where they practiced a military landing and trained to storm it, the source close to Hamas said, adding they even made videos of the manoeuvres.
“Israel surely saw them but they were convinced that Hamas wasn’t keen on getting into a confrontation,” the source said.
Meanwhile, Hamas sought to convince Israel it cared more about ensuring that workers in Gaza, a narrow strip of land with more than two million residents, had access to jobs across the border and had no interest in starting a new war.
“Hamas was able to build a whole image that it was not ready for a military adventure against Israel,” the source said.
Since a 2021 war with Hamas, Israel has sought to provide a basic level of economic stability in Gaza by offering incentives including thousands of permits so Gazans can work in Israel or the West Bank, where salaries in construction, agriculture or service jobs can be 10 times the level of pay in Gaza.
“We believed that the fact that they were coming in to work and bringing money into Gaza would create a certain level of calm. We were wrong,” another Israeli army spokesperson said.
An Israeli security source acknowledged Israel’s security services were duped by Hamas. “They caused us to think they wanted money,” the source said. “And all the time they were involved in exercises/drills until they ran riot.”
A few days later, there were articles about how incredibly detailed the maps and other information the terrorists carried were. How was all that detailed information gained? Daniel Greenfield has something to say about that, and I agree that it is probably the case that some or many of the Gazans who worked in Israel were gathering intelligence to facilitate the attack:
The Hamas invasion succeeded so well because the terrorists had an intimate knowledge of the communities they were targeting because they had worked there or had intelligence from those who had worked there. The attackers had detailed maps and building layouts. One woman whose husband and son were murdered said that the Hamas terrorists knew the names of the people, how many children they had and even which of them owned dogs.
Last year, Secretary of State Blinken addressed a J Street even and told the anti-Israel lobby that the Biden administration had pushed Israel to “improve the lives of Palestinians” by, among other things, “issuing thousands of work permits for Palestinians in Gaza”.
The number of exits from Gaza into Israel rose sharply under the Biden administration and the left-wing Bennett-Lapid government which handed out an unprecedented number of work permits.
Even Netanyahu’s government thought the program could continue and that it was working. A fatal error.