She gives a lesson in holding a note:
Loverly Audrey Hepburn
For a change of pace, here’s Audrey Hepburn singing “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “Show Me” for the My Fair Lady film. I understand why she was dubbed instead; there’s a lot of strain in her voice. But I like her version of “Loverly” anyway, because it fits and is of a whole. Her version of “Show Me” is less successful. Then again, why not use Julie Andrews, who could do it all? Hepburn herself is loverly, though. And so is that costume for “Show Me”:
The dubbed movie version of “Loverly” is here. No question that Marni Nixon and the technicians did a good job, but it’s somewhat in the Uncanny Valley for me:
I saw the stage original in 1956 with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews on Broadway when I was a small child. I remember it and I loved it.
The civilians: if Gaza is an “open-air prison” …
… (a popular descriptive phrase on the left, uttered without any indication of what it might mean or why Gazans might be blocked by other Muslim countries such as Egypt), Hamas members are presently the wardens and guards. And Egypt has a role there, too, in keeping its own borders closed.
Since Friday the [Israeli] army has been urging Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate, indicating it is planning to significantly intensify operations there. On Saturday it said Hamas was actively preventing travel south with roadblocks on major roads. …
Al-Sheikh, secretary-general of the Executive Committee of the Palestinian Authority’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), said the Palestinian leadership “rejects by all means the Israeli attempts to displace the citizens of Gaza Strip, considers this a war crime added to the series of Israeli war crimes and calls on the international community to intervene to stop this genocidal war in the Gaza Strip.” …
“If you care about yourself and your loved ones, go south as instructed,” the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“Rest assured that Hamas leaders have taken care of themselves and are taking cover from strikes in the region,” he added.
In response to the IDF’s call for civilians to move south, Hamas told residents to stay in their homes: “Do not follow the propaganda evacuation instructions.” The terror group is known to try and force residents to ignore such notices given by the military.
Hamas would like to maximize the Palestinian civilian casualties, and they are hoping that “the international community” will put the brakes on Israel in some magical manner. It’s happened before that Israel has backed off because of pleas from that community and/or pressure from the US. It may happen again, but that’s not what I predict will occur. Israel is fighting for its life, and the opinion of diplomats is not going to stop it from doing what it feels it needs to do. The Israelis themselves don’t want to kill civilians – I think they’ve made that clear for many decades, if people have eyes to see it. But they will not desist from a much more large-scale attack this time.
I think this is what Hamas wanted, thinking that Israeli retaliation and dead Palestinian children to show the press and the UN would be good for propaganda. It always has been that way in the past. I believe Hamas also thought their own terrorist brutality against Israelis would inspire and rally other Arab states and many Arab immigrants in Western countries, and it has. But I don’t think anyone except perhaps Hezbollah is eager to jump into the fray right now with boots on the ground. I could be wrong about this, but I don’t even think the diplomat crowd and their calls for “proportionate response” will matter this time, and even their voices sound somehwat more hollow than usual to me. And I think all of this is somewhat of a surprise to both Hamas and Iran.
In summary, please ponder this:
[Gaza’s] Al-Shifa Hospital is receiving hundreds of wounded every hour and had used up 95% of its medical supplies, hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia said. Water is scarce and the fuel powering its generators is dwindling.
“The situation inside the hospital is miserable in every sense of the word,” he said. “The operating rooms don’t stop.”
Selmia estimated that 40,000 displaced civilians were sitting under the trees in the empty grounds surrounding the hospital, as well as inside the building’s lobby and corridors, hoping they would be protected there from the fighting.
The hospital is widely reported to be sitting atop a major Hamas headquarters, with the terror group using the facility as a shield.
On Israel and the Palestinians: the diplomat, the admiral, and the reporters
Here’s the type of person all too numerous in our own State Department. I’m not referring to Parry the admiral. I mean the other guy, the one who speaks first, Sir Richard Dalton:
Sir Richard Dalton, knighted in 2005:
Richard Dalton was educated at Winchester College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He joined HM Diplomatic Service in 1970, went to study Arabic at MECAS in the Lebanon and was posted as Second Secretary to Amman in 1973. His next posting was as Second Secretary, later First Secretary, to UKMIS New York in 1975, and he returned to the FCO four years later. …
From 1993 to 1997, Dalton was Consul-General in Jerusalem effectively becoming Ambassador to the Palestinian Authority during the early years of the Middle East peace process. He was appointed Head of Personnel in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1998, and was sent as Britain’s Ambassador to Libya in 1999, when diplomatic relations were resumed after a 17-year break. Between 2003 and 2006, Dalton was ambassador to Iran.
Somewhere along the line something happened to him, or maybe he started out that way. I knew someone when I was in law school who later became a diplomat, and he was already an arrogant and condescending leftist with a tendency to “go native.” I also did some socializing years ago with a group of retired diplomats and I would describe them the same way.
At any rate, Dalton was complaining back in 2014 about the undue influence of the Israel lobby:
One of the frustrations is that my colleagues and I are not pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab, pro-Israel, pro-anything. We want what is best for Britain. But there is a pro-Israel lobby and it’s active in trying to define the debate in order to limit the options that British politicians can choose to options that would be acceptable to that lobby.
I don’t see anyone stopping Sir Dalton from opining ad nauseam, so that “pro-Israel lobby” must have lost the power to “define the debate.” If you go to YouTube and look at the comments to that video, almost all of them express astonishment at his statements, for example:
Can someone please explain to me how refusing to supply the enemy, who is actively aggressing against you, with your own resources for their people, can be considered a “war crime”?
No one seemed willing to answer.
Or this:
A war crime?!?! What about what the Palestinian terrorist group did to Israel??!! If your tenant kills your family, will you keep providing them cable?! Geez get real buddy!
Hoping a determined sadistically aggressive enemy can be discouraged from attacking by you taking a morally superior pacifistic stance is so naive that it would be more honest to call it what it is – stupid.
Britain would have lost WWII, if they’d been forced to live by anything like the rules he feels that Israel must adhere to.
Admiral Parry’s remarks, on the other hand, are quite sensible in that video. If I were sitting there listening to Dalton, I would not be able to maintain such calm.
Here’s an example of the way some newspeople are covering this:
Other reporters have a different approach:
Open thread 10/14/23
More on the Speaker battle
Scalise has withdrawn, Jordan is the frontrunner, and there’s a new entrant: Austin Scott. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of him before.
Any candidate can only afford four defections from the total number of GOP members of the House. I can’t quite imagine anyone getting that many votes.
What a mess.
On Israel’s position now
A good summary, worth listening to:
Israel tells the civilian population of the northern part of Gaza to leave; UN chief reacts
The announcement and the UN reaction :
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appeals for Israel to “avert a humanitarian catastrophe,” after the Israeli army ordered more than one million people to evacuate north Gaza.
“The Secretary-General and his team have been working the phones. He’s been in constant contact with Israeli authorities, urging them to avert a humanitarian catastrophe,” spokesman Stephane Dujarric tells reporters. …
He calls for the order “to be rescinded, avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”
The massacre on Saturday was a tragedy in that it was extremely sad, but it was also a war crime perpetrated by the government of Gaza. The order to evacuate northern Gaza was issued in order to help civilians avoid being killed by Israeli’s attempts to defang Hamas, the perpetrators. The situation is already “calamitous,” and telling Israel to desist merely puts Israeli lives further at risk at the expense of the Palestinians.
But I would expect nothing less of the UN for many reasons. The first one is that for decades the UN has become a cesspool of anti-Semitic anti-Israel rhetoric and condemnations, and pro-Palestinian activity. The second one is that the UN is the main agency running the Palestinian camps and providing for them. Palestinians are the UN’s most-favored refugees, until the umpteenth generation. For example:
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) announced the transfer of its operations to the south of Gaza, but he said some staff had asked to stay in the north.
“We are not pushing people to move. People have to make their own their own decisions,” he says.
There are “13,000 UNRWA staff members in Gaza, frontline workers, teachers, doctors, nurses, people offering psychosocial services. …
He says the UN was working with the Israelis and with Egypt to get aid in and create “areas of safety” for civilians.
“People should be able to be safe in their own in their own homes,” Dujarric says.
Indeed they should – even if they are Israelis. But when a nation wars on another nation, the citizens of that first nation become at risk. Israel is fairly unique in giving warnings for humanitarian reasons.
And what of this sudden mention of Egypt? The Palestinians could easily go to Egypt, but Egypt’s border has long been closed to them because Egypt doesn’t want any more of them. They’ve worn out their welcome with most of the Arab states many times over by their truculent desire to disrupt and take over every state they enter. Ask the people who fled Lebanon during the Civil War there, and ask the Jordanians who recall Black September.
The UN has been an enormous enabler of the keeping of Palestinians in camps and on the dole. See this:
Camps are set up by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to accommodate Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, who fled or were expelled during the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War or in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, and their patrilineal descendants. There are 68 Palestinian refugee camps, 58 official and 10 unofficial, ten of which were established after the Six-Day War while the others were established in 1948 to 1950s.
Whilst only a third of registered Palestinian refugees live within the boundaries of the refugee camps, Palestinian refugees “show extraordinary social and economic integration outside the camps and informal gatherings”. Many Palestinian refugees live in adjacent or nearby “gatherings”, defined as “the geographic area, outside the official camps, which is home to a minimum 15 Palestinian households.
The total number of registered Palestine refugees has grown from 750,000 in 1950 to around 5 million in 2013.
Those are the generations of their children and grandchildren and perhaps great-grandchildren, born and raised in these “camps” which are not exactly camps:
Refugee camps developed from tented cities to rows of concrete blockhouses to urban ghettos indistinguishable from their surroundings (effectively becoming urban developments within existing cities or by themselves), that house around one third of all registered Palestine refugees.
The funding for UNRWA activities comes almost entirely from voluntary contributions from UN member states. UNRWA also receives some funding from the Regular Budget of the United Nations, which is used mostly for international staffing costs
I don’t think there’s any other group in the world that’s been given such preferential treatment by the UN for over seventy years.
As for how many Palestinians don’t support and cheer the murder of Jewish babies, I don’t know. I am virtually certain there are some, but I don’t think it’s even a majority. I’m with this guy on the question:
Abortion is business as usual
Left-wing Hollywood actress Kerry Washington argued that abortion is a “normal part of women’s lives” in her memoir during a discussion about her past abortion.
“The reality is that abortion is a very real and normal part of women’s lives,” Washington writes.
“It’s just so important to me that abortion is not a bad word,” Kerry Washington said in an interview with People Magazine.
That’s quite a cause to espouse.
The actress – of whom I’ve never heard, but to tell the truth I haven’t heard of most of the younger set in Hollywood – also has plans to “produce a movie centered on abortion.” I bet it will be just fabulous.
Here’s the movie I remember about abortion. Saw it in a movie theater in 1963:
That came out around the same time as The Great Escape. You might call it The Great Escape II.
Open thread 10/13/23
Echoes of the Manson murders: sympathy for the devil
See this comment by “sdferr,” which links to this Daily Mail article. Warning: graphic horrific content.
The description made me think of the Manson slayings that horrified America back in 1969. Many of us are old enough to remember. But if you don’t remember, this will refresh your memory:
[Tex Watson] whispered to Atkins and awoke Frykowski, who was sleeping on the living room couch. Watson kicked him in the head, and Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there. Watson replied, “I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.”
And Hamas has done what marauding barbarians have done since time immemorial. But it’s also what psychopathic and sadistic killers do.
[NOTE: Tex Watson, who was the main – but certainly not the only – killer in the series of Manson murders, was given a death sentence but California barred executions before his was carried out. He is still alive and incarcerated today at 77, having married and fathered four children while in prison when conjugal visits were allowed, and had converted to Christianity and become an ordained minister.]
[NOTE II: Also please see my previous post entitled, “The Klinghoffer opera: sympathy for the devil.”]
Propaganda and denial about Gaza and Israel: beheading babies versus killing babies in more conventional ways
That’s a headline I never thought I’d be writing. But when the news that Hamas had beheaded Israeli babies first came out, many many people tried to claim it was untrue. Apparently it has now been verified by many reporters and photos have been released, although I imagine some will continue to deny it.
Much like Holocaust denial, this serves a need on the part of Palestinian apologists, of which there are many.
I remember reading long ago – I believe in a book by Primo Levi about his time in Auschwitz – that one of the ways in which concentration camp guards amused themselves with their Jewish victims was to tell them that in the unlikely event that they somehow survived, and tried to tell the world what had happened in the camps, the world would never believe them. This was an interesting form of psychological torment, and I have to say that the Nazis were not entirely wrong about that disbelief.
Eisenhower understood this. People’s minds reel at the idea of such vicious savagery. And so he ordered the following:
While Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had studied his World War II enemy, he was unprepared for the Nazi brutality he witnessed at Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945. Bodies were piled like wood and living skeletons struggled to survive. Even as the Allied Forces continued their fight, Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. He invited the media to document the scene. He compelled Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves.
I’ve made the point, as have others, that one difference between WWII’s Nazi murderers and the present-day Hamas ones is that the Nazis assumed that the world would disapprove of their atrocities if people saw photos or movies of them or even heard some of the details. They correctly figured that many European countries wouldn’t mind getting rid of their Jews but might balk at the idea that most of those Jews (and others, although the main targets were the Jews) were to be summarily slaughtered, including babies, and that the ones allowed to live would be worked to death while simultaneously being starved to death while being mistreated in other myriad diabolical ways. In fact, the whole Nazi genocidal enterprise was diabolical, and so they kept it at least somewhat hidden. Earlier – before they had instituted the more efficient method of gas chambers on a large scale, they had encountered a manpower shortage in their Jew-killing efforts in Eastern Europe and had to enlist some of the natives to help with the Einsatzgruppen killings (focusing mostly on Jews but not limited to them), and they certainly did find many willing to cooperate in killing Jews. But still it wasn’t something the Nazis proudly broadcasted around the world, for what seems like obvious reasons.
Hamas does the opposite. Its killers video their diabolical atrocities and consider publicizing them to be good PR for the world’s Jew-haters, plus it’s a way to torture relatives of the victims. When I say “diabolical,” I mean “as in a horror movie such as Silence of the Lambs,” because it has been revealed that one of the things the Hamas terrorists did was to video the murders with victims’ cell phones and then post them to the victims’ Facebook pages or send them to the families so they could watch them in living color.
This is sadism of an extreme order, adapted to the modern internet social media age.
And yet we find people on Twitter (X) saying that Hamas didn’t actually behead all the babies they killed, as though that would be some sort of defense. Or that they killed babies but didn’t behead them. What’s going on with those deniers? Some are just psychopathic liars. But I think that most are just in desperation to preserve their belief system. So they must say – and believe – that the Israelis are lying about this, despite the documentation. They are also desperate to hide and/or deny the savagery of Hamas because one thing they know is that people generally love babies and want to protect them and are outraged when they are tortured and killed. That is why this act of barbarity seems to have shocked some people who had remained relatively unmoved by the rapes and the other killings, acts to which many people have somehow become desensitized (as long as they, their relatives, or their friends aren’t the victims). Baby killing is harder to ignore – and baby-beheading ups the horror ante even more.
A great many people fear that the Palestinians and the MSM will use the Israeli response as propaganda to drum up sympathy for, if not the devil, than the terrorists of Hamas and the people under their sway in Gaza. And they will certainly try, and the MSM will help them. But I don’t think it will gain them anyone who is not already firmly in the Hamas camp. I have spoken to and read the writing of several people for whom Saturday’s attack was a bridge too far; the atrocities Hamas committed are just too great and they understand that Israel must retaliate much more harshly than previously. But I have neither spoken to nor heard about anyone who had previously supported Israel who is now turning away from Israel because of the bombing of Gaza. Most sane people – and there still are a few – can see that an attack such as last Saturday’s makes it extremely clear that Israel can no longer tolerate Hamas in Gaza. The ones who cannot understand it were already lost.
People who cannot see the distinction between going into people’s homes and torturing and killing them and their babies, versus children killed as collateral damage by bombs directed at military or terrorist targets and with every effort to avoid killing civilians – sadly, such people are also lost. And yet there are many of them, and they believe that their stance is virtuous because it is against killing babies no matter why it occurs. Well, I’m against killing babies, too. But the terrible calculus of self-defense in war means that it will sometimes happen and that there is no way to avoid it, only minimize it if possible. In contrast, Hamas tries to maximize it, not only the killing of Israeli babies but also of its own children whom it purposely puts in harm’s way for propaganda purposes.
As this Hamas official says:
The interviewer interjected, “But all this was part of Hamas’s strategy in preparing for this attack.”
“Of course,” Baraka said, according to the translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a nonprofit press monitoring and analysis organization co-founded by a former Israeli military intelligence officer and an Israeli American political scientist. “We made them think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [in Gaza], and has abandoned the resistance altogether.”
“All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack,” Baraka continued. …
“The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs. The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah, defending his land,” he continued. “We have been preparing for this for two years.
A lot more than two years.
ADDENDUM: On reflection, I realize that I haven’t sufficiently made a basic point that I want to convey. Just to clarify: whether the story that babies were beheaded turns out ultimately to have been true or false, a fact such as that matters but in the end doesn’t matter as much as it would seem. We already know full well that Islamic terrorists such as those in ISIS, and the killers of Daniel Pearl so long ago, have often used beheading as a way to treat captives, and they have proudly made videos to show it. We also know that last Saturday, many women and children and even babies were purposely murdered in cold blood, in very grisly and tortuous ways and also in “ordinary” ways such as shooting young people enjoying themselves at a concert. We know that some families found out about the fate of their loved ones by the terrorists posting photos and/or videos of the killings on Facebook.
In summary, we know that enormous numbers of atrocities of so many kinds were committed that they almost could serve as a guidebook to what is euphemistically called “man’s inhumanity to man.” But for a host of different reasons, people want the horror to not be true. So many are trying to fasten on some small part of it that might be an exaggeration. But true or false, that small part doesn’t change the big picture, which is that what happened in Israel on Saturday at the hands of Hamas was an abomination, and that those who perpetrated it need to be stopped.