Abortion is business as usual

The New Neo Posted on by

A modern woman speaks:

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.

Echoes of the Manson murders: sympathy for the devil

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

No Speakership for Scalise so far

The New Neo Posted on by

So far, in a GOP House vote for Speaker, Scalise hasn’t gotten enough votes. In this case, because of the slim majority the GOP holds, “enough votes” means “near-unanimous.” Only four defections can be allowed.

That’s extremely difficult, and factions are holding back. Some of the holdouts are from the same group that toppled McCarthy, refusing to come on board. But it’s not just that group. There is another problem with Scalise, which is his health. He has multiple myeloma, and although he’s doing well at the moment, that’s a very serious concern for some who would otherwise be supporting him – or at least, that’s what they say.

The longer this goes on the more dangerous it is for the Congressional elections in 2024, because many voters don’t like the idea of disunity, and the MSM and the Democrats can be quite successful at exploiting the “chaos.”

This is interesting:

In a gesture of goodwill, Jordan has encourgaed his allies to support Scalise and offered to give his nominating speech on the House floor. But so far those entreaties have done little to help Scalise persuade his skeptics, many of whom say they plan to vote for Jordan.

Seems like this will take quite a while.

The Biden administration talks out of two sides of its mouth

The New Neo Posted on by

As expected, the administration is still protecting Iran:

Many [as far as I know, all of them Republicans] are calling on Biden to refreeze the $6 billion of Iranian funds that he had unfrozen as part of a prisoner swap deal last month. …

Tuesday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan refused to commit to taking the measure.

“You just laid out all the ways that Iran is complicit and facilitated it … is that reason enough to re-freeze the $6 billion that the U.S. helped unlock for them?” a reporter asked Sullivan.

“We have not yet had a dollar of that $6 billion spent, and I will leave it at that,” Sullivan replied.

Meanwhile, Biden’s press secretary KJP surprised me by saying the following:

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about President Biden’s message to members of Congress who seem to be equating the Hamas terror attack with actions that were previously taken by Israel. When asked which members, Real Clear Politics reporter Philip Wegmann said that some members [that’s most of The Squad] have called for a ceasefire and not gone as far as backing the administration’s call for support for Israel.

“So, I’ve seen some of those statements this weekend. And we’re gonna continue to be very clear. We believe they’re wrong. We believe they’re repugnant and we believe they’re disgraceful,” Jean-Pierre said.

For once, those words are something I can get behind. But actions speak louder than words – much louder.

I guess this is as good a place as any to add that the American death toll in Israel from the attack has now risen to 22, with some unannounced (and perhaps as yet unknown) number probably taken hostage. The Israeli death toll is now around 1200, and that may not be the final figure. And of course there have been deaths in Gaza, perhaps 1100 but I don’t think the number is really known at this point. I will add that Israel warns civilians to leave; this was no sneak attack.

I also want to add this link to an article entitled, “Years of subterfuge, high-tech barrier paralyzed: How Hamas busted Israel’s defenses: IDF was fooled by terror group’s messaging, over-relied on remote-controlled surveillance systems and weapons that were swiftly disabled by drones and snipers, enabling onslaught.” Here’s a sample from it:

Israel long thought the high-tech security barrier dividing it from the Gaza Strip — bristling with razor wire, cameras and sensors, and fortified with a concrete base against tunnels and remote-controlled machine guns — was impenetrable. …

The massive attack at dawn Saturday came under cover of a barrage of missiles aimed at Israeli civilian areas, and involved sniper fire, explosives dropped from drones on lookout and communication towers, and bulldozers that ripped through the six-meter (20-foot)-tall double fence barrier at an estimated 30 places along the border.

More than 1,500 terrorists quickly swarmed through in pickup trucks and on motorcycles, joined by others using gliders and speedboats at sea, to unleash gun attacks on nearby communities.

I have read, and I assume, that they expected to meet more resistance and didn’t. But it also seems crystal clear that this was never meant to be a military attack – it was intended to be a terrorist attack on families, women, and children.

More:

According to details reported Tuesday by The New York Times, citing initial assessments by four senior Israeli security officials, the operational failure began when an urgent alert early Saturday morning by intelligence officials about a sudden surge in Hamas communication networks wasn’t acted upon by border guards, who presumably didn’t get it or didn’t read it. …

But the main failure was said to lie with over-reliance on the remote-controlled border fence and improper defenses of it, which allowed drones controlled remotely by Hamas to bomb and disable communication towers, surveillance centers and remotely operated machine guns near the border, as well as disabling security cameras with sniper fire, instantly rendering the border defenseless.

Few soldiers were stationed near the border, both because forces were diverted to the West Bank and because the reliance on the high-tech barrier led the military to believe troops didn’t have to physically guard the frontier in large numbers. …

It took many hours until the military was able to connect the dots and take in the magnitude of the situation in the border towns, and send in adequate forces to overrun the terrorists.

Much much more at the link.

It reminds me of a highly lethal version of the fact that in the US, because everything is computerized, if the internet goes down in a grocery store, everything comes to a halt because there’s no manual alternative and anyway young people these days have trouble with simple arithmetic.

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.]