TIME magazine and the poor Gazans

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article from TIME that’s an example of the reporting on Israel and Gaza:

The Gaza Strip has endured seemingly endless tragedy. As Israel wages its war to root out Hamas in the aftermath of the latter’s Oct. 7 massacre, which killed 1,400 in Israel, at least 3,700 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. A blast at Al-Ahli hospital where many Gazans had sought refuge resulted in the loss of as many as hundreds of lives.

“Endless tragedy,” so much of it at their own hands and because of what they themselves have done.

Like most of the MSM, TIME reports on the number of Gazans killed so far since October 7th. Where do they get these figures – which vary from paper to paper, but are usually presented as some sort of verified truth although the source is rarely given? When given, the source is usually the Gazan health ministry, which lied about the hospital strike and one can assume has reason to lie about the total death toll as well.

What’s more, we also know that the hospital attack from an errant Palestinian rocket was not a one-off; Palestinian rockets are known to commonly fall inside Gaza and injure or kill civilians there. To Hamas, it’s all good, because all dead bodies can be blamed on Israel and outlets such as TIME will report it uncritically. What the real figure of dead killed by Israel might be is unknown.

In that TIME article there is no description of the horrific October 7th massacre; just the death toll. And that death toll is merely compared to the supposed number of Palestinians killed by Israel, the latter number being higher. Nor is there any statement about how many of those Palestinians killed were Hamas and how many civilians, or whether the number has been substantiated in any way. The entire statistic is reported in a manner most favorable to the narrative of Palestinian suffering being greater than that of the Israelis, and that Palestinian suffering is being caused by acts of the Israelis.

There’s much more, including interviews with many Palestinians, all of whom are remarkably attractive. The first interview is with a doctor who was at the al-Ahi hospital when the errant rocket hit the parking lot. It contains a description of the terrible burns and wounds, some suffered by children. It does at least say the parking lot was hit rather than the hospital itself – without acknowledging the original lie that traveled around the world. But there isn’t any mention of who launched the rocket, and because of that omission a reader would ordinarily think that it was Israel.

There is no attempt by the reporters to confirm anything their subjects say. The people are just quoted uncritically, and the reader is given no reason to distrust the information they offer. It is really a remarkable piece of MSM propaganda in the service of Palestine and Hamas.

George Floyd revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

George Floyd’s death has been in the news again recently because Tucker Carlson did a segment claiming he wasn’t murdered:

Carlson said that, thanks to this new information, it is now “conclusively” known that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is serving over 20 years in prison, did not murder Floyd by kneeling on his neck for several minutes on May 25, 2020.

Hennepin County Prosecutor Amy Sweasy, who is in the midst of a lawsuit against her boss, alleged in her deposition that an autopsy found no indications that Floyd was murdered. …

Sweasy said in her deposition that Dr. Andrew Baker, the medical examiner who performed Floyd’s autopsy, withheld and lied about the true cause of death as he feared the public’s reaction. He allegedly told Sweasy that the autopsy results contradicted the public’s narrative.

“He said to me, ‘Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?’ … and then he said, ‘This is the kind of case that ends careers,’” the deposition reads.

Sweasy’s deposition is new and I suppose it’s news. But evidence that Baker’s original evaluation of Floyd’s cause of death was that it was not strangulation was known as long ago as May of 2021, and at that time it was also alleged that Baker had been coerced and threatened to get him to say otherwise.

I’ve written a ton of posts about George Floyd’s death and the trials of Chauvin and the others. I’ve read many detailed reports on the trials, I’ve read the entire transcript of the interactions between Floyd and the police that day, I’ve read the recommendations that were in place at the time of Floyd’s death for Minneapolis police when attempting to restrain offenders, I’ve read the autopsy, and I’ve written about all those things in great depth. I concluded long ago that Chauvin did not murder George Floyd, and that the trial was unfair for a host of circumstances including the fever pitch pressure of the public and press that had concluded otherwise on the basis of the video of Chauvin restraining Floyd.

However, I don’t think there’s anything on earth at this point that would change the general public opinion that Floyd was murdered and that Chauvin was the perp. The fallout from that perception – not just in the US but around the world – has been incredibly destructive.

Does Israel have a “winnable solution”?

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “Bill K”:

Today I spoke with a Christian missionary based in Libya who said that if Israel forced Gaza to buckle under siege, that would be perceived by the man-on-the-street Muslim as unfair collective punishment.

Me: “Then is there no winnable solution for Israel?”

Him: “If the IDF invaded Gaza, went house to house, and specifically went after Hamas and spared civilians, that would be considered fair.”

If he’s right, then there’s no winnable solution for Israel that is not also extremely costly.

I’m always puzzled when I hear reasoning of that general sort: “If Israel did x, the Muslim street would get angry; but if Israel did y, the Muslim street would be okay with it.” I’m also puzzled by suggestions that Israel do what is literally impossible to accomplish, such as going house to house and killing not a single civilian but only Hamas members.

I’m not based in Libya. I’ve never even been there or to any Arab country. Nor am I a Christian missionary, or even a Christian. But it seems glaringly obvious to me that the Muslim street considers everything Israel does to protect itself to be not just unfair but an evil abomination. Also, the Muslim street does not consider anything Israel does to protect itself to be fair. If a single Muslim is killed by Israel, that is unfair and evil – and in fact if no Muslims are killed by Israel, Hamas and others will lie and say that they were. If a single Muslim’s home is destroyed even if no one is in it, that is unfair and evil.

If Israel exists, that is unfair and evil.

I’m not saying that every Muslim in the world thinks that way; of course that’s not the case. But it’s not required that every Muslim in the world think that way – or even the majority of them – for things to be extremely dire, because a huge number of Muslims do indeed think that way. And they are willing to kill for it and die for it and lie for it. In addition, much of the Western world seems to have been convinced that they’re correct to do so.

So even though I don’t think that Bill K’s missionary friend is correct, I think that Bill K himself is much closer to being correct when he writes, “there’s no winnable solution for Israel that is not also extremely costly.” In fact, I can’t come up with a “winnable solution” for Israel, period. Fortunately, no one is depending on me for strategy.

But at my back I always hear…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near…

As I get older, it increasingly seems to me that the world divides itself into two kinds of people. There are those who look back and say, “I’ve had a good life and wouldn’t change a thing.” And there are those who are filled with regret for what might have been and sorrow over much of what actually was.

Maybe there are always those two kinds of people at all ages, not just as one gets older.

But I wonder.

I think that the two groups reflect a very real difference in life’s trajectory. Some of it is innate personality, but some of it is luck, bad or good, that can set the course and be somewhat self-perpetuating.

Not that one’s luck can’t be changed. But as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, sometimes luck breeds more of the same sort of luck, both good and bad. Tracks get more deeply rutted; opportunities close down or get fewer. Reputations are built or destroyed. Sorrows and travails can be hard to overcome except for the most psychologically and physically resilient among us. Families and spouses either support or hinder or are indifferent. Friends come and lead to more friends or move away or die or look elsewhere for companionship. Circles of help expand or close down and are harder to rebuild. Chronic illness cuts one off. Marriages set a prevailing tone and bring a person down or lift that person up.

Yes, we make our fates to a certain extent. But I think that extent can be somewhat overestimated, except for extraordinary people. And those people often also have some sort of charismatic personality that draws people to them no matter what.

Lucky people often think they create their own luck. And perhaps they do. Or at least partially. Or perhaps they don’t. Having a loving famiy isn’t something a child creates, for example, but it affects people for the rest of their lives, however short or long they may live.

William Blake’s poem “The School Boy” is about a stifling educational experience. But it could just as easily be about a family, particularly that last verse, addressed to parents:

…How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring!

O father and mother if buds are nipped,
And blossoms blown away;
And if the tender plants are stripped
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay,-

How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?

Palestinian work permits: a Trojan horse?

The 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.]