Black Lives Matter says Jewish Lives Don’t Matter

The New Neo Posted on by

Again, why should this be any sort of surprise? In fact, to Black Lives Matter, even black lives mean nothing unless they are either killed by a white person or unless they can claim they were killed by a white person. BLM has always ignored the much greater number of black people killed by black people.

So why should support for brutal vicious Hamas terrorists surprise us? Nevertheless, I report on it – or at least, I tried to, but I see the tweet has been deleted. A description:

The Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter sparked outrage on Tuesday after it posted a graphic of a paraglider with the Palestinian flag that read “I Stand With Palestine.” The group has since deleted the post.

The BLM Chicago account accompanied the X post with the caption “That is all that is it!” The post was later updated by X, formerly known as Twitter, with a community note that read “On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists in paragliders attacked a music festival in Israel, killing over 260 people.”

If you want to see the original, you can view it here:

Did BLM of Chicago really think that tweet wouldn’t be met by mass outrage? I think the answer is yes, they really didn’t think it would be something they’d have to retract. I think this is the case for several reasons. The first is that they aren’t especially used to having what they say be received with anything but praise, love, and donations (although I think that ever since the news came out that they’d used so much of the latter to finance fancy homes, the donations probably have dried up). The second is that they live in leftist a bubble in which support of Hamas is reflexive and not only acceptable but required. I can only imagine the pushback was fierce from them to have actually deleted the tweet.

However, although they retracted that message, they replaced it with this one, which if anything is worse (similar messages from Black Lives Matter Grassroots, a national group, which called the Hamas massacre a “desperate act of self-defense”):

“Yesterday we sent out msgs that we aren’t proud of,” the organization wrote on X. “We stand with Palestine & the people who will do what they must to live free. Our hearts are with, the grieving mothers, those rescuing babies from rubble, who are in danger of being wiped out completely.”

Such utter BS. If they wanted to “live free,” they could have done that a million times over. All they had to do was stop wanting to destroy Israel, and accept the state Palestine was given right from the start and then over and over again. But no, wiping out Israel completely took priority. Oh, and maybe the Palestinians would have been living happily with their fellow Jordanians if they hadn’t gone there and tried to take over the country, causing such disruption that the government launched Black September:

Acting as a state within a state, the fedayeen openly disregarded Jordanian laws and regulations. On two occasions, they attempted to assassinate Hussein, leading to violent confrontations with the Jordanian Armed Forces by June 1970. Hussein wanted to oust them from the country by force, but had been hesitant to strike; he feared that his enemies would leverage such an offensive by equating the Palestinian fighters with civilians. Continued PLO activities in Jordan culminated in the Dawson’s Field hijackings of 6 September 1970, when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) seized three civilian passenger flights and forced their landing in the Jordanian city of Zarqa, where they took foreign nationals as hostages and later blew up the planes in front of journalists from around the world. Hussein saw this as the last straw, and ordered the Jordanian Army to take action.

On 17 September 1970, the Jordanian Army surrounded all cities with a significant PLO presence, including Amman and Irbid, and began shelling Palestinian refugee camps, where the fedayeen were operating out of. The next day, 10,000 Syrian troops bearing PLA markings began an invasion by advancing towards Irbid, which the fedayeen had occupied and declared to be a “liberated” city. On 22 September, the Syrians withdrew from Irbid after suffering heavy losses to a coordinated aerial–ground offensive by the Jordanians. Mounting pressure from other Arab countries, such as Iraq, led Hussein to halt his offensive. On 13 October, he signed an agreement with Arafat to regulate the fedayeen’s presence in Jordan. However, the Jordanian military attacked again in January 1971, and the Palestinians were driven out of the cities, one by one, until 2,000 fedayeen surrendered after they were encircled during the Ajlun offensive on 17 July, formally marking the end of the conflict.

Jordan allowed the fedayeen to relocate to Lebanon via Syria. Four years later, the fedayeen became involved in the Lebanese Civil War, which would continue until 1990.

The Palestinians tried to destroy Jordan, and succeeded in destroying Lebanon. I wonder whether the BLM people know anything about the history of the region, or the Palestinians – other than that they supposedly are “oppressed” by the evil Jews. Not that they would care if they did know.

Quite a few people around the blogosphere have pointed out that it would be nice if all the corporations that leapt to cover BLM with effusive praise and give them money in the wake of George Floyd’s death would now disown them. Don’t sit on a hot stove till that happens.

Many more thoughts on the Hamas war [UPDATED]

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) On the report about Hezbollah invading Israel from the north with drones – I’ve read contradictory things about it, but this seems to be the most recent news:

IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari says there is no security incident in northern Israel, adding that the military is investigating what caused the drone alerts to sound across northern Israel earlier this evening.

Returning to the southern front, Hagari says five Palestinian gunmen were identified near Zikim earlier today.

Three were killed in a gun battle with troops, while another two apparently fled. Hagari says troops are searching for the pair in the area.

By the time I publish this post the news on that may have changed, but that was the report just a couple of moments ago.

(2) More on Iran and Hamas, and the following should come as no surprise. Perhaps the only surprise is that it’s from an NBC report, and that the Biden administration is “investigating”:

American officials are investigating whether some of the Hamas militants who carried out the unprecedented attack on Israel received advanced training from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to current and former U.S. officials.

They are also examining whether Hamas used recent Palestinian protests along the Gaza border fence as cover to place explosives that were later used to breach the Israeli barrier. The advanced training and placement of explosives, if confirmed, would be the latest example of the decades of support Iran has provided to Hamas.

The attack, which was far more sophisticated than past Hamas operations …

That last bit was the “tell” right there. This was unlike Hamas in its scope and cleverness, but it had the whiff of Iran. More:

Experts said the Hamas assault on Israel bore a striking resemblance to tactics the Hezbollah militia used in Lebanon. It was “straight out of the Hezbollah playbook,” Levitt said.

I’m not familiar with the tactics of Hezbollah in Lebanon, but both Israel and the US should have been. They are now.

(3) I’m not sure how all of this will affect the Biden administration’s continuation of the destructive Obama policy of coddling, conceding to, and enabling Iran. They have refused so far to blame Iran directly, which could either mean they have every intention of continuing on their awful path – or it could merely mean they see no need to inflame Iran right now by blaming them but are going to pull back from appeasing and financing them. I very much think the former, based on previous experience, but I hope the latter.

I do think it somewhat intriguing how the MSM seems to have picked up on the story that Malley, the Obama and Biden negotiator with Iran, has been discredited and is under a cloud. From the articles I’ve read, the MSM is acting as though this is some sort of revelation. But it’s been obvious from the start that Malley is very pro-Iran and I have written about it before (see this). In particular, see this article from March of 2022 – that’s a year and a half ago – that I quoted at the time:

Anyone seeking to gauge the imminent outcome of the international talks over Iran’s nuclear program being held in Vienna should take a look at reports from late January that three top U.S. diplomats had quit–largely in protest over the direction set by U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, who serves as the U.S. government’s chief negotiator.

Having served for two years in former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Iran Action Group, I knew that this development was tantamount to a public cry for an intervention. Such resignations–not of conservative dissenters, but of career staff and President Joe Biden’s own political appointees–should have been cause for Biden or Secretary Antony Blinken to recall Malley and investigate. Their failure to do so is a sign either of a troubling lack of attention to the talks, or else the possibility that Malley–who served in the same capacity under President Barack Obama when the first Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was originally negotiated and signed–has been given a free hand to negotiate whatever he wants, as long as he gets Iran to sign.

I wrote this at the time: “Are these people being paid off? Are they Iranian moles? ”

(4) Why would anyone be surprised at the silence of Representative Rashida Tlaib when directly asked about Hamas killing/decapitating babies? Tlaib has a long anti-Israel pro-Palestinian history, and I’m not sure most people are aware that although she was born in the US, her parents had emigrated from Ramallah and East Jerusalem.

(5) Mass rape was absolutely the intent of Hamas, to “dirty” the women. That’s quite an idea – an ancient one – that it dirties the women but not the men doing it. The words “barbaric” and “primitive” are appropriate. Any person pretending to defend women or women’s rights who “stands with the Palestinians” or “stands with Hamas” is a defender of this horrendous anti-women (really, anti-human) atavism. I think that fact should be rubbed in their faces over and over.

ADDENDUM (the stories just keep coming):

(6) It’s not about “oppression.” It never was. It’s a holy war of Islam against the infidel world. It’s an old old story, and the Koran orders and approves it.

(7) You know those action movies where a brave woman is the leader? Well, apparently that happened at this kibbutz.

(8) The New York Times doesn’t want to call babaric Hamas terrorists “terrorists.” It changed the word to “gunmen” – probably the better to implicate guns as the culprit. Of course, the terrorists used more weapons than that, including knives or machetes, and burning alive.

(9) You may have read, as I have, about some of the murdered Israelis having taken shelter in “safe rooms.” I have wondered about that; obviously, the rooms were not safe. I’m not sure whether they were these, but my guess is that this is the explanation: they are made to resist bombs and rockets, which prior to this weekend were thought to have been the main mode of attack.

(10) One bleak but useful result of what’s going on is the clarity on who the vicious Jew-haters in the US are. No surprise that a lot of them are in academia.

An intelligence failure of the imagination

The New Neo Posted on by

The Israeli response to the Hamas attack wasn’t just an intelligence failure in terms of acting on information, although it certainly was that. But I think that, more importantly, it was a failure to think outside the box and even imagine the sort of attack that occurred. Much like our intelligence prior to 9/11 – an event that showed a sort of evil creativity on the part of the terrorists to come up with a new approach, one that intelligence in the US simply didn’t anticipate. Whether it was because US intelligence agents underestimated the terrorists or had just became complacent in their thinking, they simply did not even imagine what happened – and in order to prevent something, you have to imagine it first.

I believe the same was true of Israeli intelligence. There were things about this attack that should have easily been imagined, such as the anniversary element, which is often part of terrorist plans. I am not altogether certain why the Israelis were caught flat-footed on that. Many people have postulated they were too distracted by their own internal problems, or even that anti-Netanyahu forces knew something was brewing and let it happen in order to embarrass him, thinking it would be far smaller and more limited than it actually was. Israel has been much safer in recent years than during the Second Intifada, and that probably was part of the reason their guard was let down.

But for decades Hamas seemed to mostly have the same approaches over and over: a limited number of rockets, and small-scale suicide bombers and the taking of a few hostages here and there. There was never anything remotely approaching this scale. And although there was plenty of brutality, there was nothing like this extreme level and scope of sadism, torture, rape, killings of children in front of parents, and glorying in it in ISIS-like fashion.

There was also apparently an over-reliance on the idea that terrorists would communicate online. But did no one ever think that Hamas or the Iranians might figure out that made them vulnerable, and that they would use the old tried-and-true non-internet methods to communicate?

When I got the news of the Hamas massacres, it occurred to me that the hand of Iran was visible not just in the financing but in the concept and the planning. And indeed, this seems to have been the case, although of course Iran denies it:

Iranian officers — as well as reps from Iran-backed militant groups including Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — refined tactical and strategic plans for the assault during several meetings in Beirut, according to the [Wall Street] Journal, which cited senior members of both terrorist groups. …

“An attack of such scope could only have happened after months of planning and would not have happened without coordination with Iran,” Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London, told the outlet. …

The overall plan is to eventually wage active war with Israel on all fronts to finally close in on it with the help of Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members and an Iranian official told the Journal.

Why now? That seems obvious, doesn’t it? Not only was it the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, but both the US and Israel are currently torn by internal political factional strife. In addition, Biden is president, and appears visibly weak and feeble. Weakness leads to enemies’ boldness.

Another element in the intelligence failure was a years-long campaign of taqiyyah by Hamas in order to conjure up a false sense in the Israelis of lessening Hamas truculence:

Hamas conducted a years-long campaign to fool Israel into thinking the group did not desire armed conflict and could be placated with economic incentives to maintain relative calm, a source close to the terror organization told the Reuters news agency Monday.

“Hamas gave Israel the impression that it was not ready for a fight,” the source told the agency. …

The source said that Hamas convinced Israel that it was more interested in ensuring Gazans had work permits that allowed them to enter Israel, where they earned higher salaries than they would in the enclave.

Sounds as though Hamas relied on a common Western impression that extremists will become less extreme once they are doing better economically. I suppose it sometimes works for non-fanatics. But not for fanatics – or psychopaths. It was an elaborate con on the part of Hamas.

Another tactic that thwarted Israeli security:

The source said that many leaders of the terror group were not told of the planned attack in order to prevent it leaking to Israel. In addition, the approximately 1,000 terrorists involved in the devastating assault were not told exactly what they were training for. …

Former national security adviser Yaakov Amidror told Reuters that some countries allied with the Jewish state had bought into the lie, telling Jerusalem that Hamas was showing “more responsibility.”

Let’s guess which ones those countries might have been.

If you’re interested in some of the details of how security was breached, this is what has been reported (although it’s possible that Israel isn’t telling all it knows – at least, I hope they’re not):

First, a barrage of some 3,000 rockets was fired at Israel.

At the same time, a cell flew hang gliders across the border and secured the area, allowing an elite terror unit to breach Israel’s fortified security barrier.

The source said explosives were used to breach the barrier and the first terrorists went through on motorbikes. Then bulldozers were brought in to widen the gap, allowing jeeps to drive through.

The source said a “commando unit” of terrorists then attacked the headquarters of the IDF’s southern Gaza division “and jammed its communications, preventing personnel from calling commanders or each other.”

Perhaps that last IDF headquarters attack was primarily a cyberattack.

There was a smaller-than-usual IDF presence there because troops had been moved to the West Bank, where there had been recent violence. Apparently the thin IDF presence at the border where they invaded surprised even the terrorists.

The source added that “The operation exceeded all expectations.” I have little doubt that it did, and that they expected to be met with much more IDF resistance.

I believe we are vulnerable to similar actions, due to the porosity of our borders. The same is true of Western European countries such as Sweden and Germany, and many more. Is the era of relatively small scale terrorist attacks over?

[NOTE: This is a good, if highly depressing, article on the intelligence failures and the entire attack in general. From it, I learned of one more atrocity that I think is emblematic of the Hamas interface between the barbarism of old and the modern world: the terrorists killed a grandmother and uploaded a photo of her dead body onto her Facebook page, where her family saw it and learned that she’d been murdered. I was wondering whether they made her give them her Facebook password before they killed her, and then I realized that they probably just used her cellphone, in which she was almost certainly signed into Facebook.]

[NOTE II: See this article about how there was too much reliance on technological intelligence and defense and not enough on human intelligence and defense. Also this quote from it:

Islamists live in an economy of honor and shame, and they used smartphone cameras and social media to humiliate Israelis. Social-media platforms are full of grotesque images of Israeli hostages suffering mental torment and physical abuse, and haunting video clips showing disgraceful violations of dead bodies. As the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has written, these images did not show Hamas supporters getting “carried away”; they were instead “the essence of the whole enterprise.” The humiliation of Jews is the point. Those images attune us to the reality of evil, and the reality of evil obliges us to confront it.]

The terror of the barbaric

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been covering the Hamas massacre since it happened, and it touches on something very deep that goes back to childhood terrors. When I see or hear the suffering it is sickening. I wish it were fiction, but it’s not.

I have always been sensitive to horror films and don’t watch them. But on TV I once almost accidentally saw the end part of a horror film that I had trouble shaking for a long time because it was so sadistic. The Hamas attacks remind me of that feeling. We see people who are helpless in the face of unspeakable horror, as the bright happy everyday world of a bunch of young festival-goers, or of modern couples with beautiful infants and toddlers, was without warning invaded and overtaken by the most evil of evils.

History tells us this happens again and again, but we try to tune it out because it is so deeply frightening. 9/11 brought it to our attention, the Rwandan massacres by the Hutu brought it to our attention (although much further away and in the third world), every terrorist attack brings it to our attention. And now this. There is a special horror in the fear of being at the mercy of evil and sadistic people who delight in the suffering of their victims.

Civilized behavior is a precious achievement that has taken millennia to achieve. But it is one we all too often have taken for granted. We should not; it is fragile and tenuous.

Not only Hamas but those who support and justify the sort of behavior exhibited by Hamas have gone beyond the pale of civilized behavior. Whether they do so through ignorance or stupidity or pathology of the mind and spirit, that is what they have done.

Over the years I’ve been blogging, I have written many many posts on Israel and Palestine: the history and the moral differences between the two sides. But I believe most people remain ignorant of all or most of this. The MSM has been a big factor in amplifying Palestinian propaganda in the past. Much of the MSM will probably do so even now, which shows how bankrupt they are. But I’m not sure; I detect a slight change of sorts, at least for the moment. It might not last.

One of the things I’ve noticed among those who defend what Hamas does is a failure to understand the difference between a child dying as collateral damage when a military target in Gaza is struck by Israelis after a terrorist attack by Palestinians – a target that was placed by Hamas in vulnerable residential areas and places such as hospitals and schools where children will sometimes be killed even though the Israelis warn the population and even give time for people to leave – and the deliberate, sadistic, purposeful murder of Israeli children by Hamas. It’s all dead children, right? Children should never be killed in an ideal world. But although in war it happens, civilized nations try to avoid it. In contrast, terrorists seek it out and revel in it when they do it. And their sympathizers think those two approaches are equivalent – or pretend to think it. Or, they think the Israelis are worse, because they are modern and successful and the Gazas are poor and “oppressed” (mainly by other Arabs and Palestinians, but that’s ignored as well).

Is this inability to tell the difference between the actions of the two sides a cognitive failing, a moral failing, a spiritual failing, or what? I don’t have the answer. But I know it’s a widespread failing, and is especially common among the intelligent. Propaganda is certainly part of it, but plenty of people are resistant to such propaganda. Why do some succumb?

And so we see photos and videos of children as hostages, being tortured psychologically and physically. Some of them saw their parents deliberately murdered in front of them. We hear of dead babies in cribs – not collateral damage, but murdered in a frenzy of homicidal rage and now justified by college students and even some members of Congress.

At least when the Nazis dashed out the brains of Jewish babies against brick walls they didn’t take photos and disseminate them around the world in order to gain support. They knew, or thought they knew, that most of the civilized world would highly disapprove if they saw those photos (even though much of the civilized world cooperated with rounding up their own Jews and sending them away, as long as they didn’t have to face what ultimately happened to them). Now, Hamas thinks photos of the horrors they perpetrate will enhance their status in the eyes of many people. And they are correct.

[NOTE: Years ago I wrote many articles for PJ Media. They are gone from that site now, but I made copies of them before that happened. Two of them in particular were on the subject of why the barbarity of Arab terrorists appeals to so many people. I plan to republish those essays some time in the not-too-distant future, as well as maybe one or two old blog posts relevant to the subject.]

More thoughts and links on Hamas’ massacre in Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

It has been described variously as Israel’s Pearl Harbor and 9/11, or both combined. And that is at least somewhat the case. The Hamas massacre was Pearl Harbor in the sense of a huge wakeup call that was not anticipated by intelligence. But Pearl Harbor was an attack by members of the Japanese military on military men and material at a military target, so in that sense it was more like a conventional war although war had not been declared.

And the Hamas massacre resembled 9/11 in that it was a massive surprise attack on civilians. But unlike 9/11, in the Hamas attack women and children and old people were specifically targeted, torture and desecration of bodies was common, and hostages were taken in order to use as torture bargaining chips. So Saturday’s horror was worse than 9/11 in that sense. Plus, adjusted for population, the number of people killed and wounded was greater.

But to me, the massacre by Hamas was also like a much smaller version of the medieval Jew-killings that almost eliminated the Jews of Europe, or the Nazi Holocaust. That’s the impulse I see operating, and I have no doubt that the killings would be of everyone in Israel if Hamas had the power.

I won’t watch the videos. The descriptive words are enough. Mark Steyn details the horror in this article, and I’m sure you can find videos all around the internet if you’re so inclined. As I write this, the most recent death toll in Israel is 1200 (9 Americans so far), and I’m inclined to think it will rise further (among other things, many of the wounded are near death and will probably die).

In the aftermath of the attack, Israel has somewhat relaxed its strict gun possession rules, but only somewhat. In addition, there is this:

Energy Minister Israel Katz announces that he has instructed authorities to cut off water to the Gaza Strip.

“I instructed that the water supply from Israel to Gaza be cut off immediately,” Katz says in a statement, adding that the flow of power and fuel was ceased two days ago.

How much of Gaza’s power does this affect? This Guardian article says 80%. That same article manages to barely mention the killings by Hamas in Israel, and certainly leaves out all the important details: the torture and horror, the sneak attack element, and the puposeful targeting of women and children, while it focuses on civilian casualties from the retaliatory raids (raids which are not a surprise at all, by the way).

Here’s an interesting quote:

Ghalayini said Palestinians were awed by the unprecedented nature of Hamas’s incursion into Israeli territory.

But, he added, this was not without widespread fear. “People are also very fearful of what’s to come. But Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have suffered so much over the past 15 years of blockade and attack after attack from Israel, so they feel they have nothing left to lose,” he said.

“Awed” – as in “celebrating the massacre, rape, and torture of helpless women and children.” The entire Guardian article talks about the Palestinians as victims of Israel, as befits a leftist media publication. But the Palestinians’ suffering is actually at the hands of Hamas, whom many support, and who really could not care less how many Palestinians die – even purposely locating military targets in civilian areas such as hospitals in order to use the civilian casualties as propaganda in the Western world.

I doubt that the Palestinians actually feel “they have nothing left to lose,” as quoted in the Guardian. I think most of them know full well they can lose a lot more, and that Hamas has unleashed a response from Israel that might have that result.

[NOTE: I’m not sure where to put this piece of news about certain Harvard groups supporting the Palestinians, so I’ll place it in this post.]

According to Hamas (and their sympathizers), Israelis must submit without retaliating

The New Neo Posted on by

Hamas has stated the following:

“We announce that every targeting of our people who are safe in their homes without warning, we will regretfully meet with the execution of our enemy’s civilian hostages,” Obeida said. He said the executions would be broadcast “in audio and video.”

Note that the broadcasting of the horror is an integral part of it. This is the ISIS philosophy and it is intended to do three things. The first is to maximize the suffering for the hostages, their families, and any viewer who isn’t already a Palestinian partisan. The second is to show the world what mean m-fers are the men of Hamas; this makes psychopathic sadists feel macho and strong. The third is to spark a prisoner exchange by Israel to free the hostages, which unfortunately has been Israel’s policy until now. I don’t think Israel will do that, but I guess the world will find out.

At the same time, another Hamas official has said that Hamas is “open to mediations,” having achieved its goal of humiliating Israel. I also doubt such negotiations will be taking place.

Iran’s influence: Obama and Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

The Iranian mullahs came to power in 1979 and immediately revealed their true colors. Until the Obama administration, every president after that seemed to understand that it was not in our interests to give them concessions. But Obama was different, and a pillar of his foreign policy was the so-called Iran Deal.

The deal seemed either insane or traitorous or fatally naive, or some combination of those things. Obama pursued it relentlessly, and Biden went on to follow in his footsteps, either with full or partial awareness of what he was doing. And by the way, because Biden was not senile when he was VP and yet he didn’t resign in protest at the Iran Deal, I am going to assume he agreed with it and continues to agree with it with whatever part of his brain still functions these days.

I have written a great many posts on the Iran Deal and Obama, but here I’ll quote someone else who summarizes the theories around Obama’s position:

The situation unfolding in Israel is precisely the one for which Obama laid the foundation during the eight years of his presidency. The Iran deal, in whose name the administration twisted itself into a moral pretzel, was forced into policy not because Obama has any great passion for the mullahs in Tehran, but because it was predicated on a wholesale restructuring of the Middle East.

In this view, an ascendant Iran would be a counter-balance to Israel. It would force Israel’s hand in dealing the Palestinian situation in the way that Obama and his foreign policy circle believed was the only way. It would counter Saudi Arabian power as well, creating a sort of triangle of tension to maintain balance. But the key to it was to speed up Iran’s march to power by allowing the country to remain at the edge of nuclear breakout, which is what — explicitly — the Iran deal did.

There’s also Obama’s belief in his wondrous self:

Obama always fancied himself a great agent of change, a figure upon whom the presidency was virtually bestowed, who would master the world’s greatest problems with his intellect alone, and collect all the rich rewards, prizes, praise and of course the wild jubilation he knew he deserved.

Some people believe that Obama is actually a Muslim and that’s the origin of his policy. I disagree; I actually think Obama is not religious at all. He definitely was raised in a Muslim-friendly environment, and that probably factors into all of this, but he is not a Muslim IMHO. For those who quote his “my Muslim faith” statement in support of the idea that he is a Muslim, please see this for the way in which they are misinterpreting his statement.

Biden recently released to Iran six billion dollars in previously frozen assets, but that was done so recently that it’s more likely that Hamas’ barbaric massacre of Israeli civilians was financed by the 1.7 billion dollars Obama had released to Iran in 2016; see this:

The money was flown into Iran on wooden pallets stacked with Swiss francs, euros and other currencies as the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement resolving claims at an international tribunal at The Hague over a failed arms deal under the time of the Shah.

A fifth American man was released by Iran separately.

Details of the cash delivery drew fresh condemnation of the Iran deal from Republicans. They charged that the administration had empowered a major sponsor of terrorism because the nuclear agreement enables Tehran to re-enter the international economy and gives it access long-frozen funds.

Those pesky Republicans. Of course, they were correct, because Iran is Hamas’ backer, and its sponsorship has borne horrific fruit in Saturday’s massive attack on Israelis.

And this news came out recently, about another development regarding Iran during Obama’s second term:

In the spring of 2014, senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials initiated a quiet effort to bolster Tehran’s image and positions on global security issues — particularly its nuclear program — by building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers. They called it the Iran Experts Initiative. …

The communications reveal the access Rouhani’s diplomats have had to Washington’s and Europe’s policy circles, particularly during the final years of the Obama administration, through this network.

They wouldn’t have had such influence, however, if the ground hadn’t already been prepared to receive their point of view.

And here’s Caroline Glick’s take on this aspect of things:

Although alarming, the depth and breadth of Iran’s infiltration of Washington’s foreign-policy and media establishments exposed in this week’s reports isn’t surprising. Over the past two decades, reports of Iranian infiltration of Washington policymaking circles have come out in a near continuous stream. But rather than clean house, the Washington establishment has castigated those warning of Iran’s penetration as bigoted, and not infrequently, as pro-Israel agents.

Obama certainly did fundamentally change things, just as he promised.

What Kipling knew

The New Neo Posted on by

They’re back. Or actually, they never left:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!