More on Sinwar and the six slain hostages

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s unclear how the information in this article was obtained, but it seems to have been from a combination of: testimony from the hostages who were released or rescued previously, evidence collected by the IDF and analyzed scientifically, and answers that captured Hamas terrorists have given when interrogated. There also might have been electronic eavesdropping and even spies or informants in the Hamas camp or among other Gazans.

At any rate, here’s some of what is claimed to have been the case:

According to the report, the six captives — Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi — were kept further north in Gaza in the first month of the war …

In November, as part of the weeklong ceasefire-hostage deal with Hamas that saw the release of 105 civilian hostages, Israel agreed not to carry out surveillance in the territory during specified hours, while the truce lasted. During that time, the terror group transported some remaining hostages to new locations, the report said — including to Rafah, where the IDF had not yet entered.

Rafah is the place where Biden and most of the international community pressured Israel not to enter.

More:

Hamas moved the six hostages to a tunnel three stories (20 meters, or 65.6 feet) belowground, the report said. The hostages’ captors reportedly resided in a building aboveground, with a shaft leading down to the captives.

The six Israelis were apparently kept in this tunnel system the entire remainder of their lives, subsiding mostly on energy bars, according to the report.

The hostages were placed in the corridor where they would eventually be killed — which was even harder to reach and had worse conditions than where they’d been held before, in the same system — after Israeli troops rescued four hostages alive in central Gaza’s Nuseirat in June.

On August 21, when the IDF was operating in the area, pursuing intelligence that Sinwar was likely in the vicinity, troops reportedly spotted and attacked a group of some 26 terror operatives, most of whom were killed or wounded.

Those men, Channel 12 reported, included Hamas terrorists who had been guarding the six hostages for some eight months. Other longtime guards of the six fled amid the IDF operations, the report said.

Those captors were reportedly replaced by two relatively junior operatives, who were instructed to kill the captives if the IDF closed in on their location.

That’s exactly what these new guards did.

The following is especially heartbreaking and touching. But the mistreatment and suffering of the hostages at the hands of Hamas is no surprise whatsoever:

The hostages’ bodies testified to a struggle, as has been previously reported. One hostage had shielded Carmel Gat, and another managed to escape several meters before being killed, the report said.

Channel 13 in September cited “forensic” findings showing “Hersh, Ori, Alex and Almog defended Eden and Carmel.”

The hostages’ bodies also evidenced malnourishment and frailty, partly explaining why they were not moved along with the Hamas leader as he sought to outrun Israeli forces — they were too weak.

It was previously reported that Eden Yerushalmi appeared to have been starved, and had lost 10 kilograms in captivity, weighing only 36 kilograms (79 lbs) when she was recovered.

The four men tried to shield the two women.

RIP.

The only possible silver lining in the dark cloud of their deaths is that it may have been the outrage that more fully unleashed the wrath of Israel against the perpetrators, and may lead to a more definitive defeat of Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Iran. One can hope, anyway.

Trump the unlikely populist at the McDonald’s fryolator

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Trump does some funny stuff here, working the fryolater and then the driveup line at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. It drew the usual outrage from Harris supporters:

The restaurant was closed to the public during his visit, and NBC News reported that the customers who Trump served at the drive-thru were pre-screened by his campaign and vetted for security.

Those measures come after Trump has been the target of two assassination attempts earlier this year– one at a rally in Pennsylvania, and one at a Florida golf course.

The visit amounted to a campaign stunt to generate coverage, and it drew criticism from the Harris campaign and its allies.

“Donald Trump, a 78 year old, who’s never earned a real paycheck in his life, put on a show, playing dress up to act like he’s one of us,” Shawn Fain, head of the United Auto Workers (UAW), said at a Harris campaign event Sunday.

One of the many many many things about Trump that drives the left wild is his ability to appeal to what used to be called “the common man,” despite his great wealth and the fact that he was born to wealth. But his popular/populist appeal is real and was one of the first things I noticed about him back in 2015 shortly after he launched his presidential campagin. In August of that year I wrote a post about him entitled “Trump the unlikely populist.” I wasn’t a fan at the time – I preferred other GOP candidates, and the fight for the nomination was just beginning. But I certainly noticed his appeal.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Trump has mastered not just the “art of the deal” but the art of giving a speech that sounds like ad-libbing stream-of-consciousness but is not. As he went along it occurred to me that what he is doing is cheerleading for America, reiterating over and over what he would do for America and what he would do for the people he is speaking to, and fitting his words to their desire that America be what it once was. It’s the flip side of Obama’s hope and change: they hope that he can change things back to a time when America was great, and that’s his explicit message and the slogan on the very flyover-country-looking hats he wears and sells. This is a guy who knows marketing, and it’s no accident that the slogan is also pretty much what Reagan used in 1980 (Reagan put the word “let’s” at the beginning of the phrase, but otherwise it was exactly the same). …

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m not a Trump supporter, but that I also get his appeal. Watching him speak at length, I “got” it even more. He makes all other politicians look boring and stilted (hey, many of them are boring and stilted). He makes it all sound so simple—just as Obama did, but in a completely different direction and with a completely, and I mean completely, different style. Populist appeal is a neat trick in a man who’s a multi-billionaire and who grew up in enormous wealth and graduated from Wharton. But he’s got it, and although I’m sure he carefully nurtures it he manages to make it look natural.

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him—although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

Over nine years ago.

That recent quote from Fain, the head of the UAW, went like this: “Donald Trump, a 78 year old, who’s never earned a real paycheck in his life, put on a show, playing dress up to act like he’s one of us.” What does being 78 have to do with it – except that the Harris campaign likes to hammer home the idea that Trump is worn and tired? And of course Trump is “playing dress up” – the whole thing was a humorous troll of Kamala, and no one was meant to think that Trump was presenting himself as a guy who really worked, or had worked, at McDonald’s.

But two parts of Fain’s sentence interest me even more. The first is Fain’s statement that Trump acts like he’s one of us. But who is this “us,” kimosabe? McDonald’s workers are not auto workers and the job is more likely to be a brief stint for young people just starting out. That’s the way Harris has presented her supposed history at the chain. Nor is Harris “one of us” either, of course, although – unlike Trump – she really does pretend to be. Her parents were members of the intellectual class, she was raised in the liberal enclave of Berkeley and then the foreign one of Montreal, she then became a prosecutor protected and promoted by a well-connected man (Willie Brown) and the rich donors of San Francisco, and yet she keeps telling us how solidly middle-class she is.

The second part of Fain’s comment that especially interests me is the assertion that Trump has “never earned a real paycheck in his life.” I wonder whether NBC, the network where Trump’s long-running TV show “The Apprentice” aired, would agree. I’m going to assume he didn’t do the show for free and that he got something amounting to a “paycheck” from NBC. And of course he made plenty of money in business, although no boss was handing him a paycheck.

However, when Trump was young and learning the business from his father – who was a real estate developer – his father insisted he learn the business from the ground up. That meant working at a number of positions such as this:

He and his brothers also as boys were trained by dad in the business. So they would sweep out basements, collect coins from the coin-operated laundry machines in the apartment buildings. Sometimes do little repairs. And when they got a little older, dad would have them collect rents. Because he expected them to all go into the business with him.

I once read a biography of Trump that said much the same thing, and that Trump raised his own children the same way, learning the business from the ground up. And this Chicago Tribune article from 1989 – written back when the press was still relatively kind to him; title “Trump: the people’s billionaire” – says this:

Indeed, Trump came off much the better on that broadcast [the Phil Donahue show]. ”The audience loved me.” Hundreds of viewers wrote him. I was so embarrassed by Phil Donahue`s treatment of you . . . It`s unfortunate that jealousy makes people behave so badly . . . I will never watch him again. . . .

”He`s the people`s billionaire,” says Ivana Trump, not without pride.

”You have no idea. Middle-class Americans adore Donald, and I don`t know why.

”They shouldn`t,” she says. ”They should resent him. He`s young and wealthy and he flaunts it.”

”Yeah, I find I get along better with the construction workers and the cab drivers,” Trump agrees. ”The people who count in the world. Working people respect the fact that I built this company by myself. People like Donahue, they don`t dig it. They`d like it for themselves.”

Trump has been remarkably consistent about that sort of thing.

[ADDENDUM: It’s now being alleged that McDonald’s made an offer to Harris for a similar photo op, but they never received an answer.]

The Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI) – plus, Kamala and the Christians

The New Neo Posted on by

I had never heard of the above group called IBSI before, but CAMERA is having a Gala Champagne Brunch on January 8, at St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, featuring someone named Dumisani Washington as the speaker, on the topic of “Standing With Israel: growing the Zionist movement in the 21st Century.” It’s an interesting approach, because Christians are among Israel’s staunchest supporters in the US, and yet black and/or Hispanic people consistently are found to have higher rates of anti-Semitism than other demographic groups.

See this:

Dumisani Washington is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI) and the former Diversity Outreach Coordinator for the over 10 million member Christians United for Israel (CUFI). He is also the host of the Truth to Power with Dumisani Washington radio program on the HNEW HD3 FM 102.7 in New York City as well as on all social media podcast platforms. Dumisani is a pastor, professional musician—graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music—and author whose latest book is the second edition of Zionism & the Black Church: Why Standing with Israel Will be a Defining Issue for Christians of Color in the 21st Century. He and his wife, Valerie, have been married 36 years and have six children and three grandchildren.

However, I don’t think Kamala will be joining the movement any time soon:

In addition to everything else you could say about that, it seems an exceptionally stupid thing to do. Why alienate a huge voting bloc? Is it because she’s already written Christians off anyway, since she is so pro-abortion? But for me the most shocking thing about her behavior in the clip is the mocking laughter. She’s not trying to hide her contempt for believers or for those who disagree with her.

Actually, I have yet to see Kamala Harris laugh at anything that’s actually funny, or make a joke that has any humor in it.

Serenade: how to film ballet

The New Neo Posted on by

Or how not to film ballet.

I admit it’s a very difficult task. Film flattens a three-dimensional highly spatial art into two dimensions of flatness. Dance’s impact can only really be made in space, which allows for perspective and weight. But without film dance is completely ephemeral. I have memories of transcendent performances, but I’m happy to have films – however inferior – to look at as well. For me, they spark memories. For those who didn’t see the originals, they give at least a glimpse of some of the greatness.

If a pas de deux – a dance for two people, a man and a woman – is being filmed, the task is somewhat easier. The camera can come in fairly close and it’s an approximation of the shapes the performance made in space, and the viewer can also see some facial expressions. Too close offers too much of the strain, but too far depersonalizes and threatens to turn the dancers into featureless dolls.

However, for an ensemble work, the challenge is much greater. The only way to see the patterns is to position the camera quite far away, as though the viewer is seated in the mezzanine or even balcony. But then the personalities and expressions are somewhat lost. So most filmmakers or videographers cut back and forth from far view to medium view to closeup, depending on what’s happening with the action. But making those choices is not easy and way too often the result, although well-intentioned, is a dizzying confusion that causes the viewer to lose sight of the ballet itself as a whole – which, after all, is the way it’s meant to be viewed.

Here’s a frustrating example. It features one of my very favorite ballets: Balanchine’s “Serenade,” which is a masterpiece. The music is Tchaikovsky’s exceptionally lovely “Serenade For Strings.” The performance is apparently from 1973 although the film is dated 1977, it’s Balanchine’s own New York City Ballet, and I’m very familiar with all the soloists. But even though I know and love the ballet, the camerawork is dizzying and disorienting. No sooner do you get an idea of what’s happening than it cuts to something else:

Here’s a video from a 2011 production by the Sacramento Ballet, a lesser although very good company. I think the director strikes a better compromise and most of the time you can see both the dancers and the shapes the group makes onstage, so important for this particular ballet:

Trump answers the charge of whether he’d use the military to move against his opponents

The New Neo Posted on by

In her Fox News interview with Bret Baier, Harris said this about Trump:

You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him,” Harris told the Fox News host.

“This is a democracy, and in a democracy the president of the United States in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it,” she said.

If you would like to read what Trump actually said rather than Harris’ spin on it, see this. I think it’s quite clear – although he could and should have made it more clear – that he’s talking about violent, disruptive, far left demonstrators, and mostly about calling on the National Guard if necessary to maintain order. There’s nothing really new or different about that, although many people on the NY Times staff got all upset when Tom Cotton mentioned something similar a while back.

For example, here’s one of Trump’s previous statements on the matter:

On Oct. 13, during an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump was asked if he is expecting chaos on Election Day. The former president said he was not anticipating mayhem from “the side that votes for Trump” but from what he called “the enemy from within.”

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and [are destroying] our country — I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day — I think the bigger problem are the people from within,” Trump said.

“We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” Trump added.

Here’s more recent clarification from Trump, from a WSJ interview:

Columnist Peggy Noonan, a longtime and sometimes severe critic of Mr. Trump, asks him to clarify [comments he made in an interview with Maria Bartiromo televised this past Sunday]: “If you were to reach the presidency again, would you of course rule out using the military to move against your enemies? That is, yours would not be a fascist-style government that would use its agencies, entities or military to move against your political foes because they have opposed you—is that correct?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Trump says, “but I never said I would. . . . First of all, Biden, who doesn’t know he is alive—Biden said that he expects there to be a lot of trouble if I win the election. That’s a very bad statement for him to make. He said that. That’s where this came from.” Mr. Trump digresses into his poll numbers and has to be brought back on topic.

Ms. Noonan: “But you would never do that?”

Mr. Trump: “Of course I wouldn’t. But now, if you’re talking about you’re going to have riots on the street, you would certainly bring the National Guard in. As an example, in Minneapolis while I was there”—meaning while he was in office—“they had riots, literal riots. That whole city was burning down. And Minnesota, the governor was supposed to—our favorite governor—the governor was supposed to do it. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. And I said, ‘You got to get the National Guard.’ . . .

“And when you looked over the shoulder of that poor guy from CNN, that poor, stupid reporter who was standing there saying, ‘This seems to be a peaceful demonstration,’ then he gets hit on the leg with a rock, and behind him the whole city was burning. It looked like World War II in Berlin, and he’s trying to say that it’s peaceful. So I insisted that the National Guard—if I didn’t do that, I don’t think you would’ve had a city left. So I’m only talking about in cases like that where you need help. You can’t say, ‘I’ll never bring in everything,’ as the entire country is disappearing in bedlam. But certainly not against my opponents—it’s against civil unrest.”

But Harris would much rather imply that Trump will have some sort of policy of using the military to shoot his enemies and “the American people,” as well as locking up people who merely “disagree with him.” No, that last bit is solely the province of the party to which Harris belongs.

Drone targets Netanyahu’s house but no one’s home; Blinken and Biden have a plan

The New Neo Posted on by

Was Netanyahu’s house hit? It’s unclear from this article. The NY Times says the drone hit a nearby building. But either way, this particular drone didn’t set off any warning systems. That’s the danger of drone attacks, which sometimes activate such systems and sometimes do not.

At any rate, Netanyahu himself seems fine – although lame-duck Joe Biden has been saying that now that Sinwar is dead it’s time for a ceasefire. That’s the typical backwards logic of Biden; on the contrary, it’s actually time to press on and finish the job of defanging Iran’s proxies. Only then is it “the day after.” But Biden wants something to happen prior to the 2024 election, so he and Kamala can claim some sort of credit.

The article says there’s a plan:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is considering a post-war plan for Gaza based on ideas developed by Israel and the United Arab Emirates that would be presented after the presidential election, U.S. officials say.

Why after the election?

More:

Several officials in the White House and State Department are concerned the plan would marginalize Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his government, which is what Israel and the UAE are pushing for in the immediate term.

They’re concerned about that? Abbas, who is now eighty-eight years old, to be turning eighty-nine in a month? That Abbas? The one who is weeping for Sinwar?:

The Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and seen internationally as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, expressed its condolences Friday on the “martyrdom” of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, calling him a “great national leader” and urging Palestinian national unity. …

Israel has long accused Abbas and the PA of backing terror by lionizing terrorists as “martyrs” and paying stipends to jailed terror operatives and families of slain terrorists.

It also accuses the PA of inciting to hatred of Israel in its education system. Fatah regularly lauds the actions of Palestinian terrorists and senior Fatah officials have at times expressed support for Hamas and its deadly attacks on Israelis.

Those are not just Israel’s accusations – not just Israel “pouncing.” I don’t think the accusations are disputed. More:

Abbas has indicated that the PA is willing to take control over the Gaza Strip after Hamas is removed from power there — on condition of the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Big of Abbas. Is that consistent with Blinken/Biden/Harris’s plan?

The Idiocracy of Tim Walz

The New Neo Posted on by

The self-described knucklehead doesn’t even know what a venture capitalist is:

“Sen. Vance became a media darling. He wrote a book about the place he grew up. But the premise was trashing that place he grew up rather than lifting it up,” Walz said on Tuesday of the Republican vice presidential hopeful, adding, “This guy is a venture capitalist cosplaying as a cowboy or something.”

“I don’t even know what a venture capitalist does most of the time!” he then yelled.

Social media reacted with quips and astonishment to Walz’s comments about the term “venture capitalist,” which regards one who invests in a startup business venture.

“Tampon Tim be like ‘vote for me. JD Vance is smart and I’m an idiot,’” a social media user reacted on X.

Walz is going for the Idiocracy vote. Maybe it’s a rather large bloc these days, alas.

[NOTE: If you’re unfamiliar with the movie Idiocracy, you might want to take a look. It’s transgressively, offensively funny.]

More details on the ignominious death of Sinwar

The New Neo Posted on by

From the British press:

A unit from the IDF’s 828th Bislamach Brigade was patrolling Tal al-Sultan, an area of Rafah, on Wednesday morning, when it came across a group of three Hamas fighters in the street and engaged them in a firefight.

The terrorists were ‘on the run’ moving from house to house, the IDF said, and became split up.

One of them, since identified as Sinwar, ‘ran alone into one of the buildings’. He went up to the second floor, and troops responded by firing a tank shell in his direction.

So – if that account is correct – it explains how Sinwar was originally identified as a terrorist, and why he ended up alone in the building where he ultimately died. Apparently he and the other two had been on the move.

Grenades were thrown at the IDF troops (it’s not clear from where), and then they decided to send a drone into the building into which the man later identified as Sinwar had gone. That’s how we got that amazing drone footage of him sitting in a chair, with a hand wounded from the gun battle in the street, looking at the drone and throwing something at it that appeared to be a stick.

And then:

Two 120mm tank shells slammed into the building, as well as a surface-to-surface Matador missile, according to Israeli reports, with shrapnel scything across the upper floors and killing Sinwar.

Unaware they had taken out Israel’s prime target, the soldiers did not return to the site until Thursday morning, when soldiers from the 450th Infantry Battalion were sent in to get a closer look.

So there was a delay, and then a different unit was the one that uncovered the body and recognized that it could be Sinwar. Also:

He was found with a weapon, a flak jacket and 40,000 shekels (£8,250).

‘Yahya Sinouar had a lot of cash and fake passports on him, he was ready to flee,’ Israeli army spokesman Colonel Olivier Rafowicz told French outlet CNEWS this morning.

He claimed that the items Sinwar had on him, which allegedly also included a card from UNRWA, the UN aid for Palestinian refugees, ‘may show that he was ready to flee and leave Gaza and his men behind.’

During his many years in Israeli prisons, Sinwar learned to speak fluent Hebrew. He could have fled to Israel, perhaps, and organized something horrific there. There are other possibilities as well, of course – Iran or Qatar come immediately to mind. But the shekels are interesting.

The details of Sinwar’s death are sordid and ignominious, far from glorious. That makes it harder for Hamas to present him as some sort of hero. I continue to wonder what percentage of Gaza’s population is rejoicing at the news. Israel has offered evidence that at least some people were happy. And then there’s this:

An opinion poll published in mid-September by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), a think tank based in Ramallah and funded by Western donors, showed for the first time the majority of Gazans opposed the decision to attack Israel on October 7.

The poll, conducted in early September, found that 57% of people surveyed in the Gaza Strip said the decision to launch the offensive was incorrect, while just 39% said it was correct – down sharply from the previous poll in June.

Hamas has long been accused of crushing dissent in Gaza with beatings or worse. But recent months have seen some rare public displays of dissent.

This isn’t evidence of any newfound love of Israel. But it’s still an important thing if most Gazans come to think that the war against Israel was a bad move, and that it is they who have suffered a result, and will suffer from any future such aggression on their part.

The Democrats are trying to say Trump is the cognitively challenged one

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems a bizarre approach to me, but they must be getting feedback that their base loves it. Because I think that, for most other people, all it does is remind them of how the Democrats tried for so long to cover up Biden’s decline. After all, the fact that they could no longer keep up the pretense is the reason Kamala Harris is the Democrats’ candidate today, and everyone knows it.

And yet in her Fox interview, Kamala Harris continued to deny there was anything wrong with Biden. It’s such brazen gaslighting it deserves some sort of award. Plus, does it fool anyone?

Meanwhile, Trump has coherent long-form interviews with all sorts of people, and although he includes his trademark eccentricities such as what he calls “the weave,” he seems quite with it to me. That doesn’t stop the Democrats from claiming he’s exhibiting cognitive problems. They read it into this town hall meeting – interrupted by medical emergencies for two spectators and overwhelming heat, that then turned into a musical interlude – into some sort of evidence of mental lapses on Trump’s part.

And now there’s Trump’s appearance last night at a Catholic charity event, in which he seems to have been unusually entertaining and funny. You can read an account here and watch some clips. And yet Harris-Walz 2024 Rapid Response Director Ammar Moussa put out this statement about it:

Donald Trump struggled to read scripted notes written by his handlers, repeatedly complaining that he couldn’t use a teleprompter. He stumbled over his words and lashed out when the crowd wouldn’t laugh with him. The rare moments he was off script, he went on long incomprehensible rambles, reminding Americans how unstable he’s become. And of course he made it all about himself. He may refuse to release his medical records, but every day he makes it clear to the American people that he is not up to the job.

To me it seems a weird approach, for the aforementioned reason that Trump isn’t generally perceived that way but Biden was. In addition, Kamala isn’t sounding like the sharpest knife in the drawer. And “every day it’s she who makes it clear to the American people that she is not up to the job.”

Time for a laugh

The New Neo Posted on by