Palestinian work permits: a Trojan horse?

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

Israelis and the endgame

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden said something recently about October 7th that reflects a sentiment I’ve heard others express as well:

You can’t look at what has happened here … and not scream out for justice,” Biden continued. “Justice must be done. But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

What a muddle. “Justice” and “rage” are two very different things. But both are different than war – although war can be motivated by either or both. “Mistakes” in war don’t necessarily stem from rage, either, although I suppose that a war waged only out of rage could be particularly prone to tactical mistakes.

But our mistakes in our post-9/11 wars had little to do with rage. I think they stemmed from beginning wars without a clear plan for the endgame, and without considering how changes of administration would affect any endgame we set up along the way.

I also think that it is offensive to compare Israel’s situation to ours after 9/11. Yes, both terrorist attacks had some superficial similarities. The perpetrators were jihadis, and the intent was to kill many civilians in an effort to frighten, humble, and intimidate. People often say that the scale of 9/11 was smaller than what happened in Israel on October 7th. Biden himself compared it to fifteen 9/11s.

But there’s another huge difference, and the Israelis are quite aware of it: America is a very big country and was not existentially threatened by 9/11, but Israel is tiny and is existentially threatened by an attack of the scale and ferocity of October 7th, committed by people who not only say they want to obliterate the country but who live next door. Not only are these jihadis right there as neighbors, but they are joined, trained, and supplied by a much larger and more powerful country – Iran – intent on acquiring nuclear weapons and very possibly willing to use them to take out Israel once and for all.

It is also deeply Orwellian for the pro-Palestinian protesters to characterize Israel’s intent as “genocidal.” Not only does Israel itself have a population that is 20% Arab and not Jewish, and therefore is multi-religious and multi-racial (Israel has a sizable black population, for example), but Israel has never expressed or demonstrated a genocidal impulse towards the Palestinians and in fact could have wiped Gaza out some time ago had it wished to do so. What’s more, the word “genocide” describes what the Nazis tried to do to the Jews, and almost succeeded in accomplishing. It is a very special abomination to accuse Israel of such a plan vis a vis the Palestinians.

In that article Biden is also quoted as having said that “the Palestinian people are suffering, and that the vast majority of them are not represented by Hamas.” I don’t think anyone would dispute that they are suffering, although I would place their suffering squarely on their elected leaders, Hamas, and their own desire to wage war rather than accept the statehood which they could have had 75 years ago and have been offered several times since then.

But how does anyone know how many of them are “represented by Hamas”? One doesn’t hear of dissidents in Gaza, but that’s because anyone bold enough to speak out against Hamas would almost certainly be silenced and perhaps murdered. Biden – and others – are postulating a sort of “silent majority” of peace-loving Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere. This is a mere speculation, one for which there is no evidence at the moment.

But perhaps it’s true – I’d like it to be true. If it is true, getting rid of Hamas would probably solve the problem, in a real-life equivalent of this scene:

But I think it’s naive to believe that, once freed of Hamas, the Palestinians would not come up with something similar or worse. So even if the Israelis are successful in removing Hamas, what replaces it, and how?

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Sidney Powell pleads guilty and gets 6 years probation. I’m not sure what if anything this will mean for Trump, but apparently part of her plea agreement is that she will be required to testify in future trials.

(2) Joran van der Sloot admits having killed Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005, as he pleads guilty to extorting her mother. Part of the agreement is that he won’t be tried for her murder. He is already serving a sentence for the murder of another woman – but not a life sentence. Outrageous and horrifying.

(3) Another Speaker vote, but I’m not optimistic about it.

(4) This would be nice if it pans out:

Stem cell biologist Helen Blau of Stanford University School of Medicine and colleagues previously found that blocking 15-PGDH in old mice restored their withered muscles and improved their strength after a month of treatment. On the flip side, young mice lost muscle and became weaker after their levels of this enzyme were increased for a month.

Blau’s team has now found that 15-PGDH accumulates in the muscles of old mice as the connections that allow communication between muscles and nerves are lost, another consequence of aging. Treating old mice for one month with a drug that inhibits 15-PGDH restored these connections, called synapses, between muscle fibers and motor nerve cells, and boosted the animals’ strength …

(5) Another Nazi admirer heard from.

Academics and artists for Palestinian terror

The New Neo Posted on by

If the horrific situation in the Middle East can be said to have any pluses, probably the only one would be that it has underlined the destructive state of academia in the US today. I use the word “underlined” rather than “revealed” because I’m addressing the readers of this blog, and I think most have known for a long time that a dangerous rot has set in with both administrators and professors. But for much of America I suppose the correct word would be “revealed,” because I think that the extent of the problem was probably not so widely known, although the general trend might have been.

And so we have this sort of thing. The signers identify themselves as “writers” but many are in academia – often formerly prestigious universities:

You can find the document here. Many – although hardly all – of the signers seem to come under the heading of DEI hires in obscure “soft” disciplines, and quite a few seem to be able to claim several intersectionality points. Their petition is loaded with the usual leftist jargon and twisting of history, and it is quite clear they don’t believe that Israel (which they refer to as “Israel” in scare quotes, as though it’s a fiction) should be allowed to exist.

This just might be my favorite Orwellian quote from the letter (emphasis mine):

Gaza is the story of … sumud (steadfastness) and resistance: resistance that is driven by a love for one’s people, a love for one’s homeland, and a love for life and freedom.

And beyond Orwellian is the way they describe the events of October 7: “the resistance bulldozed part of the fence around Gaza and some Gazans set foot outside the boundaries of their besiegement for a moment.”

No doubt the Palestinian terrorists did this to exercise their great “love for life and freedom,” which was so much in evidence that day; I guess 18,000 work permits weren’t enough.

And that’s all that the letter-writers managed to say about the massacre of Israelis at the hands of Hamas.

And then there’s the story of the trans art/science teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago who posted some especially vile Jew-hating spewings.

And 2,000 actors, artists, and musicians expressed their enormous sympathy for the Palestinians without mentioning the October 7 attacks at all.

I remember reading somewhere long ago that, after the vicious Munich massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in 1972, Arafat and the Palestinians actually garnered a lot more support than before – and certainly more fame – all around the world. Since then, that support has swelled, due to a combination of immigration to Western countries from Arab and Muslim lands as well as the takeover of academia by the left. After all, it’s in school that these ideas can be most effectively spread, and the left is well aware of that.

It seems clear to me that the people making these statements – be they in academia or in the arts – are largely unafraid of any backlash. I doubt they’ve experienced anything of the sort before, and most may not even be experiencing much of it now, although some have seen some negative consequences. Living in a bubble where almost everyone agrees with them, and where they have had protected status, hasn’t led them to be afraid of voicing opinions like the ones in the letters. I believe they actually see such declarations as proof of virtue, and by signing them they are signaling that virtue. In their circles, it probably has long worked that way, so why would they expect anything different?

[NOTE: I didn’t look at all the signatures – it would take way too long. But my guess is that there are some Jewish names among them. So I’ll just briefly say that some leftist Jews – overwhelmingly ethnic Jews rather than religious ones – have reacted to the long and sorrowful history of persecution and murder of innocent Jews by siding with their enemies in a usually-doomed effort to say, “see, I’m one of the good ones, please don’t hurt me.” They become extremely valuable to their enemies in this way.]

I think that if we had to fight WWII today we would not win

The New Neo Posted on by

I believe that, were we to fight a war like WWII today, we would not be able to win. I don’t say that because we lack the weapons or the skills. I say it because I believe that we would fight with our hands voluntarily tied behind our backs. I base that on a few things.

One is the chart that can be found here. I can’t seem to copy it, so you’ll have to follow the link to see it, but it shows the results of a poll that demonstrates enormous generational differences in the answers to the question of whether Israel’s military response to the Hamas attack is fully justified. It goes from 81% agreement from those 65+ to 27% agreement from those who are 18-34 years old.

And then of course there is the woke agenda of so much of today’s military.

Another reason I doubt we could fight WWII today is that our young people no longer believe in evil – unless it’s the evil of those who would oppose abortion, or misgender someone, or have the gall to be white and not apologize in the required manner for their privilege. That is, they cannot recognize true evil when they see it, because the principles that have been drilled into them are as follows:

(1) Privileged people are guilty and the oppressed – as defined by the left – are always innocent no matter what they do.

(2) One cannot and should not judge a culture – except the culture of the West.

(3) History itself doesn’t need to be learned; just leftist ideas and principles.

(4) Well-meaning elite people can fix anything without bloodshed.

(5) All killing is bad unless it’s done by the underprivileged, in which case it’s a shame but understandable. Or maybe not even a shame.

(6) War never solves anything (see this). They don’t understand that some wars are for survival against an enemy bent on your subjugation or obliteration, and that those wars sometimes are – very very unfortunately – total wars. In total wars innocent people die, but something is indeed solved.

NOTE: Please also see this relevant piece.

Anne Frank: are people good at heart?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. I think it’s always timely, and certainly is timely now. I came across a reference to Anne’s famous statement recently in an essay on the Hamas attack of October 7, and once again the person who wrote the essay simplified and misunderstood what I see as Anne’s message.]

I’m currently reading Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: the book, the life, the afterlife. It’s about the process by which Anne Frank wrote and then rewrote her diary, with an eye to its ultimate publication, and how her father edited her two versions into a third, the one the world ended up knowing. Then Broadway and Hollywood got into the act, as well as writers such as Philip Roth, until the diary and its message had morphed quite a bit from the original (or, more properly, originals).

Most of us have read Anne Frank’s diary – or at least parts of it, in some form or other – and even those of us who did not, are probably familiar with at least a few of its quotes, the most famous of which is probably Anne’s observation: “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

It’s instructive to look at the quote once again, embedded in its original context. When we do, we find it to be far more complex and dark than it appears when as a single famous sentence standing alone, just as Anne Frank’s achievements as a writer and thinker are far more complex than the simplifications popular culture have worked on her diary. Remember as you read the following that she was only fifteen years old when she wrote it [emphasis mine]:

Anyone who claims that the older ones have a more difficult time here certainly doesn’t realize to what extent our problems weigh down on us, problems for which we are probably much too young, but which thrust themselves upon us continually, until, after a long time, we think we’ve found a solution, but the solution doesn’t seem able to resist the facts which reduce it to nothing again. That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually turning into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

Anne Frank seems to take the long view. Hers is a consciously willed optimism that takes into account some of the greatest horrors the world has ever known, and includes her own untimely death, which she correctly foresees. Whether the peace and tranquility she ultimately envisions are temporary or permanent, and whether they are of this earth or beyond it, her message has nothing of the innocence or simplicity of a trusting child, although it has often been portrayed that way.

More on lethal journalism: Palestinian lies and MSM amplification of those lies

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an excellent article about the rot in journalism exposed by the “reporting” on the Gaza hospital [emphasis mine]:

The media’s disastrous failure on the Gaza hospital bombing story is one of the most vivid and instructive examples of the structural and inherent problems plaguing contemporary journalism. It mirrors many other fiascos of the past decade.

That sentence I highlighted is the most important point: this is not a one-off. This is commonplace, and has been not just for the past decade, but for many decades. It’s not just stories about Israel and Palestine, of course; it also happens with any story the left thinks will hurt the right. I could name many, but one that comes to mind and which is emblematic of the genre was Rathergate. Remember the expression “too good to fact-check?”

More:

It is clear at this point that journalism schools are producing closed-minded, credulous ideologues who will believe anything that comports with their worldview. It’s either that, or we have a bunch of closed-minded ideologues who are willing accomplices in spreading propaganda. Functionally speaking, it doesn’t really matter. In either case, their sympathies lie with Hamas.

You will almost certainly recognize the old “fools or knaves?” question. I say: both.

More:

[The NY Times] has spent decades spreading similar disinformation. The paper’s editorial board and its op-ed pages are teeming with Hamas apologists — as are its news pages.

Even as Hamas’s propaganda was being exposed, the Times moved forward with the story without any genuine substantiation. Since the newspaper had done absolutely no work in verifying these serious claims, it was left without facts or art. So editors simply put a picture of a bombed-out building (not the hospital) on its front page, strongly insinuating that Israel was responsible for the tragedy (that wasn’t.)

How can that be seen as anything but malicious?

I think “malicious” is too mild a word for it.

More:

Of course, any person who’s spent more than ten minutes on the Israeli-Palestinian situation — to say nothing of those who are paid to cover the conflict — knows full well that both Hamas and the PLO are constantly lying about alleged Israeli atrocities and casualties.

That’s where I beg to differ. I think a great many people who have spent at least 15 minutes on the topic – sometimes more – do not know or will not admit that to themselves because they feel such an admission would be racist. Forget that “Palestinians” are not a race. Forget that if people habitually lie it is not bigoted to state that fact.

The Palestinians and the MSM know that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on. That’s why lies are so valuable for their cause. The MSM could stop making things worse, but chooses not to do so.

Open thread 10/19/23

The New Neo Posted on by

I went for a leaf-peeping drive yesterday with out-of-towners. It was cloudy, and a lot of the leaves had prematurely dropped because of too much rain. So I didn’t take a single photo. But here’s an old one, not of New England but of a trip to the Hudson River Highlands:

The consciousness of infants

The New Neo Posted on by

Of interest:

There is evidence that some form of conscious experience is present by birth, and perhaps even in late pregnancy, an international team of researchers from Trinity College Dublin and colleagues in Australia, Germany and the USA has found. …

To provide a new perspective on when consciousness first emerges, the team built upon recent advances in consciousness science. In adults, some markers from brain imaging have been found to reliably differentiate consciousness from its absence, and are increasingly applied in science and medicine. This is the first time that a review of these markers in infants has been used to assess their consciousness.

Co-author of the study, Lorina Naci, Associate Professor in the School of Psychology, who leads Trinity’s ‘Consciousness and Cognition Group, explained: “Our findings suggest that newborns can integrate sensory and developing cognitive responses into coherent conscious experiences to understand the actions of others and plan their own responses.”

I’m not the least surprised. My son was born at around 5:30 in the morning. That afternoon, he was awake and swaddled and I was holding him in my arms. I’d had very little experience taking care of babies prior to that. He looked me right in the eye and I was stunned at the awareness I perceived there. It was really an encounter with a person, a fairly strong-willed one who seemed to be saying, “I expect you to do right by me.”